Deer modern Germanic languages save English and Scots retain the more general sense: for example, German "Tier" and Norwegian "dyr" mean "animal". For many types of deer in modern English usage, the male is a "buck" and the female a "doe", but the terms vary with dialect, and according to the size of the species. The male red deer is a "stag", while for other large species the male is a "bull", the female a "cow", as in cattle. In older usage, the male of any species is a "hart", especially if over five years old, and the female is a
Red deer "Cervus" genus ancestors of red deer first appear in fossil records 12 million years ago during the Miocene in Eurasia. The European red deer is found in southwestern Asia (Asia Minor and Caucasus regions), North Africa and Europe. The red deer is the largest non-domesticated land mammal still existing in Ireland. The Barbary stag (which resembles the western European red deer) is the only member of the deer family represented in Africa, with the population centred in the northwestern region of the continent in the Atlas Mountains. As of the mid-1990s, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria were the only African countries