Ben, what's your take on Merriams??? Apparently many think they never were a seperate sub species. That they never existed.
I think that, as likely as not, they were a desert adapted ecotype (the new term for most populations of what have been called subspecies). The few museum specimens that exist do show some variation in size and skull characteristics compared with the Rocky Mountain elk. However, they were described during the time when vertebrate taxonomists made their reputations describing previously unnamed taxa, and many of the "subspecies" have since been found to not be genetically distinct from their sister subspecies. With the advent of DNA analyses, it has finally become possible to mathematically describe just how different or alike any two individual specimens or populations really are.
Coincidentally, I spent most of the day at a gathering over in Portal, AZ, on the west side of the Chiricahua Mountains. When I moved down here 25 years ago, I researched the possible occurrence of elk in the Animas and Peloncillo Mountains here in New Mexico and the Chiricahuas over in Arizona. There were no valid records of elk from either mountain range, nor were there records for the Sierra San Luis and Sierra Madre south of us in Mexico. Recently, a prehistoric archeological site just outside of Portal was revisited and the depth and extent of the excavations were extended. I had heard that the dig had turned both elk and bison bones, neither had ever been known to occur in these "sky island" mountain ranges. A friend who works at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson was there today and I asked her about this. She confirmed the finds and promised to send me a copy of the report.
I think that we have a Pollyanna-like notion that the first naturalists to visit many parts of the west and record their observations were describing a pristine and relatively static landscape. In fact, the Apaches and their predecessors had been here for a long time before the first anglos were finally able to spend any amount of time here. They had a tremendous impact on the native biota, both large and small. Small, isolated populations of elk and bison which had been here since the late pleistocene could very well have been extinguished by aboriginal hunters prior to the visits of the first Europeans. They certainly did it with many other pleistocene large mammals.
