after aquatic plants in lakes. After antler growing, stags could probably satisfy their nutritional requirements in productive sedge lands bordered by willow and birch forests. The Irish elk may have been preyed upon by the large carnivores of the time, including the cave lion, and the cave hyena. Extinction Outside of the Irish Late Pleistocene, remains of Irish elk are uncommon, suggesting that they were usually rare in the areas that they did occur. Historically, its extinction has been attributed to the encumbering size of the antlers, a "maladaptation" making fleeing through forests especially difficult for males while being chased by human hunters, or being too taxing nutritionally when the vegetation makeup shifted. In these scenarios, sexual selection by does for stags with large antlers would have contributed to decline. However, antler size decreased through the Late Pleistocene and into the Holocene, and so may not have been the primary cause of extinction. A reduction in forest density in the Late Pleistocene and a lack of sufficient high-quality forage is associated with a decrease in body and antler size. Such resource constriction may have cut female fertility rates in half. Human hunting may have forced Irish elk into suboptimal feeding grounds. The range of the taxon appears to have collapsed during the Last Glacial Maximum, with few remains known between 27,500 and 14,600 years ago, and none between 23,300 and 17,500 years ago. The remains of the taxon substantially increase during the latest Pleistocene, where it appears to have re-colonised most of its former range, with abundant remains in the UK, Ireland, and Germany. While the range of the taxon was dramatically reduced after the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, it managed to survive into the early Northgrippian in the eastern part of its range within European Russia and Siberia, in a belt extending from Maloarchangelsk in the East to Preobrazhenka in the west. It is suggested that extinction was contributed to by further climatic changes transforming preferred open habitat into uninhabitable dense forest. The final demise may have been caused by several factors both on a continental and regional scale, including climate change and hunting. Lister and Stewart concluded in a study of the extinction of the Irish elk that "it seems clear that environmental factors, cumulatively over thousands of years, reduced giant deer populations to a highly vulnerable state. In this situation, even relatively low-level hunting by small human populations could