What is the largest deer?

What is the largest deer? The moose, Alces alces, is the largest living species in the deer family.

Moose are the tallest and heaviest extant deer. Large males can exceed 2 metres at the shoulder, and the largest reliably recorded individual weighed about 820 kilograms. The Alaskan subspecies, Alces alces gigas, is especially large. Its broad, flattened antlers are distinctive, unlike the more branched antlers of many related deer.

A common mix-up involves the word “elk.” In North America, elk usually means wapiti, Cervus canadensis, which is smaller than a moose. In Britain and much of Eurasia, however, “elk” is the ordinary name for the moose itself. The animal is therefore called “moose” in North American usage but may be called “elk” elsewhere.

The record concerns living deer. Extinct cervids, including the giant deer or Irish elk and the broad-fronted deer, reached impressive sizes and sometimes had much larger antlers. They do not change the answer when the question asks for the largest living deer.