giant deer

English

Noun

giant deer (plural giant deer)

1. The extinct Irish elk, Megaloceros giganteus, which lived during the Pleistocene.
   • 2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: The First 100 Million Years, Penguin, published 2019, page 201:

     Countless fossils of the giant deer have been unearthed from Ireland's peat bogs, and it seems that in the nineteenth century no Irish baronial manor was complete without the skull of an ‘Irish elk’ in the entrance hall.

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see giant,‎ deer.
   • 2016 June 24, Jarles Alberg, The Adventures of Chucky and Ginger as Told to Little Cowboy, Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 245:

     They came to a bend in the trail and started around a big tree, when suddenly they came face to face with a giant deer—with two antlers, each the size of a big dog!