WITH MUSEUM ARTIST’s PICTURE of RECREATED ANTELOPE

A Bambi paradise, prehistoric Europe certainly wasn’t. For the orphaned Forest Prince of the original Austrian folk-tale would have had far worse to worry about than mother-killers, scientists have discovered.

A unique palaeontological find has confirmed fossil research from the 1950s about the scale of climatic change across a vast area of central and south-eastern Europe.

Austrian scientists have recovered the fossilized remains of an extinct species of a spiral-horned antelope that once roamed Miocene Europe 11 millions years ago.

A team from Vienna’s Natural History Museum made the discovery, the most complete set of remains yet found – one rear thigh and lower leg bones, the ankle-joints, and the animal’s upper jaw-bone, complete with teeth and some fragments of its skull.

What makes Miotragocerus different from the rest of the antelope family is that it was a leaf-eating herbivore whose natural habitat were dense rainforest floodplains - much like those in present-day Indonesia, and the Okavango delta in southern Africa.

“This is a sensational find,” said Dr Gudrun Hock, of the Department of Geology and Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum. “We never expected to find complete parts of such an animal. Usually, it is only odd bones that survive.”

Dr Hock said recovery of this larger antelope species confirmed other recent Naturhistorisches Museum research that Europe had undergone massive environmental and climatic change on a truly unimaginable scale.

Miotragocerus’s closest surviving “relative” is the sitatunga bushbuck antelope which inhabits only the wetter parts of the southern savannah and the floodplains and delta marsh areas of east and southern Africa in countries like Zambia, Botswana and Angola.

Which, say scientists, would seem to confirm that a huge swathe of Europe east of modern-day Vienna was once dotted with alluvial swampland and primeval rainforests bordering a vast shallow inland sea that stretched from eastern Austria, covering most of modern-day Romania and Bosnia.

This saline, gradually subsiding inland sea – actually a lake – was named Pannonian Sea, after the province Pannonia established by the ancient Romans in the area of present-day western Hungary and the northwest Balkan Peninsula.

In this radically different natural topography an array of exotic animals was living, many of them now extinct. Those included the saber-toothed tiger, giant, bear-like dogs, cobra, rhinos, hippos, and long-nosed proboscideans – like mastodons and tapirs.

Scientists now believe that the Danube rose not, as today, in Bavaria’s Black Forest in southern Germany, but north-east of Vienna, and emptied into the prehistoric Pannonian Sea via a vast delta land.

The antelope remains were found 30 miles from the Danube at the small Austrian town of Obersulz, which is one hour’s drive from Vienna and situated on what in the Miocene used to be the vast flood plain of the river.

From these fossilised bones recovered in August they have been able to construct a life-like model of what the 11 million-year-old beast may have looked like – a shaggy maned, corkscrew-horned animal, possibly with pairs of narrow lighter striped markings. “We can’t possibly know what Miotragocerus really looked like,” added Dr Hock. “Apart from its size and the shape of its horns, we can only guess.”

The model has meanwhile gone on display in a themed museum park at the nearby town of Niedersulz, in Weinviertel province, Austria’s largest wine-growing region which is famous for its classic, fruity and peppery dry white called “Gruner Veltliner”.

Now Austria’s prehistorical detectives really have given the country’s Weinmeisters something to toast.

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