Hoplitomeryx

Hoplitomeryx is a genus of extinct deer-like ruminants which lived on the former Gargano Island during the Miocene and the Early Pliocene, now a peninsula on the east coast of Southern Italy. Hoplitomeryx, also known as "prongdeer", had five horns and sabre-like upper canines similar to a modern musk deer.

Its fossilized remains were retrieved from the late 1960s onwards from reworked reddish, massive or crudely stratified silty-sandy clays (terrae rossae), which partially fill the paleo-karstic fissures in the Mesozoic limestone substrate and that are on their turn overlain by Late Pliocene-Early Pleistocene sediments of a subsequently marine, shallow water and terrigenous origin. In this way a buried paleokarst originated.