We've seen some rather weird deer deformities here at Wide Open Spaces over the years. With the advent of social media networks, news of these sorts of things can spread like wildfire. Deer with extra limbs, tumors, antlered does, cactus racks, and jaw deformities have popped up, and even a two-headed stillborn fawn was found in Minnesota once. However, we've never seen anything quite like the deer shot by a hunter in Texas recently. Double Nickle Taxidermy in New Braunfels shared a series of photos of what appeared on the exterior to be a rather normal-looking whitetail buck. The only odd thing about the animal was a notably bulbous lump on the left side of the buck's snout.
The hunter, nor the taxidermist, thought much of the lump. That is, until the taxidermist skinned the hide off in preparation for a European mount. What they found under the skin is incredibly rare: the buck had a fully formed third eye hidden from view!
"What seemed to be an abscess at first was later revealed to be a fully formed eye under the skin," Double Nickle Taxidermy wrote in their Facebook post. "This will be a surprise to the hunter! We all had to go see it for ourselves today, nature sure is amazing!"
That's probably the understatement of the day. It has us wondering if the hunter who shot this buck was hanging out around the nuclear power plant. We're joking of course. We did reach out to Double Nickle and learned a little bit more about this strange whitetail's strange deformity.
"We did recently dissect it and found that it had a blood vessel and optic nerve," a spokesperson from the taxidermist told Wide Open Spaces.
There is no way to know if this means the eye was fully functional or not. If it was functional, did this deer spend his whole life with a third eye view of the underside of the skin on his face? It's weird to even imagine what that would be like for the animal. The taxidermist also posted a "before" photo of the deer that shows it otherwise seems to be healthy. It also had a rather normal and balanced 8-point set of antlers.
Just chalk this up as another example of Mother Nature at her weirdest. Just when we think we've seen it all, she comes along with something new to show we haven't seen anything yet!
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