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Classification of a White-Tail Deer

There are probably more whitetail deer on the North American Continent now than there were when Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, and they are certainly both the most numerous and the most economically important big-game species here. In some areas they are overpopulated and a burden on the environment because humans have removed almost all the whitetail's natural predators except man himself. They also move into suburban areas to feed on lawns and gardens and therefore interact more with humans, sometimes with mutually perilous results.

Kingdom
- Whitetail deer are an indisputable part of the animal kingdom, no matter how many scientists dispute the number of kingdoms there should be. They are not unicellular and they are neither plants nor fungi.
Phylum
- Whitetails are in the phylum Chordata because they have a spinal cord. They qualify for the alternative name for this group of animals -- vertebrata -- because their spinal cord runs through a hollow tunnel in a segmented backbone.
Class/Subclass
- Whitetails are in the class Mammalia because they have a four-chambered heart, warm blood and three bones in the middle ear, and hair. They bear live young and nourish them with milk made in their body. They are part of the subclass Theria, also called ungulates, because they have split (cloven) hooves.
Order
- Whitetails are in the order Artiodactyla because they have an even number of toes on each foot. Those in the order Perissodactyla (e.g., horses) have an odd number of toes and solid hooves.
Family
- The whitetail's family is Cerdivae, which includes all the different deer in the world. They are herbivores (strictly plant-eating) and ruminants (they have multi-chambered stomachs and chew their cud).
Genus
- Whitetails belong to the genus Odocoileus, which are relatively small deer with tails 6-12 inches long and white on the underside (hence their name). Males have antlers, females generally do not. They come in all shades of brown and beige, but tend to be reddish in the summer and gray in the winter. Albino whitetails are not unknown, but the rarest of all colors is nearly black. Fawns (babies) have white spots.
Species/Subspecies
- The whitetail's species is virginianus ("Virginia deer"), although their range extends to Central America and parts of South America, and they even live on islands in the Caribbean. They come in many sizes, from 500-pound giants in the north to Florida's tiny Keys deer no bigger than a collie. Which of the 37 subspecies of whitetails they are assigned to indicates where they were born or are native to (e. g., borealis from the northern woodlands, clavium from the Florida Keys, goudotii from the Colombian Andes and western Venezuela, curassavicus from the island of Curaçao).

Animals & Science