Largest muntjac

The largest species of muntjac or barking deer is the giant muntjac Muntiacus vuquangensis, native to Vietnam and Cambodia. Weighing 30–50 kg, it is twice as heavy as other muntjacs and a third longer, too, with antlers up to four times as large – which makes it all the more remarkable that this sizeable species remained undescribed by science until as recently as 1994.

On account of its very large size, when the giant muntjac was originally scientifically described and named it was allocated a new genus all to itself, Megamuntiacus ("big muntjac"). Subsequent genetic analyses, however, have revealed that despite its size it is sufficiently closely related to all of the other, smaller muntjac species for taxonomic separation from them at the genus level to be unwarranted, so it has been reassigned to the genus Muntiacus.

Its species name, vuquangensis, is derived from Vu Quang, a hitherto little-explored forested area of Vietnam where it was first found by scientists, during the early 1990s.