Drop tines aren’t so rare. But when they look like drop balls then it’s weird!

This chital deeris pretty… weird. Look at the strange balls falling down its ears. Are these drop tines (tines that point down)? If yes, something went very wrong there! Here for comparison a picture of a ‘normal’ chital deer with vertical growing antlers (tines):

This is the only explanation I can guess of for this poor deer:

When a deer sheds it’s antlers and grows a new pair it is covered in velvet, which is a fuzzy looking jumble of blood vessels that help the antler grow. Normally they grow vertically and are not forming weird balls at their extremities! But sometimes, whenever a deer hits its velvet covered antlers into something, like a tree branch, tines can drop and further grow like this. The reason the tunes form when this happens is because the velvet actually has a lot of blood flowing through it, and whenever an antler gets hit, it either bursts a blood vessel or clots one, and so the blood has to find a new path to go to. This leads to the formation of the drop tines.

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