Animals With The Biggest Horns In the World

Horns are an undeniably fascinating creature feature! Their sharp points and dangerous curves never fail to let you know exactly which end of the animal is dangerous. And the bigger they are, the more intriguing they can be. From curly crowns and girthy gizmo’s to unbelievably long lances, let's explore some of the hugest horns in the animal kingdom.

Saiga Horns

Native to the dusty plains of Kazakhstan, Russia, Mongolia, and occasionally Uzbekistan when they migrate, the Saiga is an utterly bizarre and delightful looking subspecies of antelope!

And at first glance, the only thing that outshines their wonderfully weird horns is that fleshy, double barreled nose. They use that wobbly snout to filter out dust from the air during the dry summers, and warm up cold air before it enters their lungs in the winter.

But it’s those strange, almost carrot shaped horns, which only the males have that really make them stand out! Those can reach a huge 15 inches long, making them about the same height as a bowling pin! Sadly, those unique horns have made the males of that species a huge target for poachers.

Although they’ve been hunted for centuries, the males have been relentlessly poached in recent years. And with so few males left in the wild, the Saiga’s birth rates have drastically dropped, leaving the species critically endangered! But what is it about their horns that makes them so alluring to poachers?

Astoundingly, a single pair can be sold for a whopping $1,000 on the black market. Often, they’re shaved up and used in traditional Asian medicines to treat common ailments, like fevers and sore throats.

When they’re not being ground into dust, Saiga use their horns for rutting. That is when males fight for the right to breed with the females, although it often comes with some lethal consequences. A fatal 50 to 70% of challengers perish during those fights, leaving the winner surrounded by dozens of adoring does.

Scimitar-Horned Oryx

You might never have seen or even heard of the Scimitar Horned Oryx before now. But that’s not because you missed some kind of memo, it’s because they’re almost extinct! That species of large antelope is native to the boarders of the Sahara Desert, and has a distinctively straight set of horns that like their name suggests, resemble sharp scimitar blades.

Even though the animal stands at an average of just 3.3 ft high, it’s huge horns can reach almost 4 ft long! They grow without any major curls straight out of the back of their skulls, which is something the ancient Egyptians took advantage of around 5000 years ago.

The thing is, the Scimitar Horned Oryx were once domesticated by those ancient rulers, who would bind the oryx’s horns together so that they’d grow and intwine into a single horn! That would have made them look a bit like unicorns, and experts that believe that is where the origins of the common unicorn myth really began!

Sadly, its magical looking horns are also the reason why the Scimitar Horned Oryx almost became as non-existent as the Unicorn! Poachers looking to sell those handsome horns gradually picked them off one by one, until they were all but extinct in the wild by the year 2000.

Fortunately, around 10,000 of them were saved through hunting driven conservation ranges in Texas, as well as many more in Zoo’s and reserves around the world. With any luck, over the next few years, we might see that African Unicorn make a magical return to the wild!

Markhor Goats

Sometimes called the "screwhorn" thanks to the spectacular spirals on top of its noggin, the Markhor goat lives among the mountains of Central Asia. During the summer, they can be found at amazing altitudes of up to 13,000 ft while they forage for nutrient rich grasses. But in the winter, they move down the mountainside to around 1,600 ft to avoid the deep snow.

They’re perfectly adept at climbing craggy rocks thanks to the wide set of their hooves, which helps them balance on almost any uneven terrain. But as high as they can climb, they can’t escape human hunters. They’ve been prized for their horns and fleece for hundreds of years, and as such, it’s estimated there are no more than 2,500 Markhors left in the wild.

Though they’re not big targets, as they only reach about 3¾ ft at the shoulder. Their horns on the other hand or should I say, hoof can grow up to 5.3 ft in length, making them nearly 2 ft longer than the Markhor is tall! Both males and females sport those tightly corkscrewed horns, but the females’ are much smaller, with most barely able to reach 10 inches long!

Jacob Sheep

Jacob Sheep are a British breed of piebald sheep which class as a polycerate, which means "an animal with many horns" for those of us who don’t speak fluent biology. While they commonly sport 4 horns, they can have up to 6 bony spikes poking out of their skulls. And that’s not by mistake!

That now domestic breed of sheep comes from a primitive and prehistoric sheep breed, which have dominant genes when it comes down to the horns. That means four horned rams and ewes are more likely to produce four horned lambs, even if their mate doesn’t also have four. But if that gene is so dominant, why don’t all the sheep we see have some kind of four horned crown?

That comes down mainly to farming practices. For many farmers, keeping sheep with four ramming weapons strapped to their heads, which can each measure up to 2 ft long would be a nightmare to wrangle! As such, that four horned fiend is less common, but is still arguably 4 times more badass than many other sheep!

Bighorn Sheep

When it comes to sheep with horns, very few can compete with the sheer girth that the aptly named Bighorn sheep brings to the table. Native to North America, the large, curled horns of the males called rams, can weigh up to a staggering 30 lbs. That’s more than all the bones in its body combined!

What’s more, is that like most animal horns that sheep’s horns never really stop growing. Their bony cores are covered in a sheath of keratin, which is the same stuff human hair and fingernails are made out of. And like hair and fingernails, horns don’t grow quickly, but over years.

That means that older rams can sport some truly colossal curls that are over 3 ft in length and almost 1 ft all the way round at their base! However, they don’t always grow in perfect coils. Back in 2014, one Bighorn ram was found to have been impaled by both its ever growing horns!

And like that wasn’t terrifying enough, the way Bighorns use their colossal curls is even more wild. When rutting with one another in the fight for females, rams will charge at each other at speeds of up to 20 mph! Just listen to the noise they make in this clip below:

Male Big Horn Sheep fighting (1) by Bradley Danielson

Fortunately, their thick skulls protect their brains from most of the damage those super charged headbutts can inflict. That’s one way to avoid some serious ram-ifications!

Valais Black Necked Goat

When you first look at the Valais Black Necked Goat, you might be mistaken for thinking their back ends have been dipped in white paint! But that distinctive coloring is all natural as are those horns on top of their heads.

Both males and females of that goat breed, which come from Valais in Switzerland, sport a set of hard horns, which can reach nearly 20 inches in females and over 31 inches in males. Although, there’s one incredible exception to that rule, and his ridiculously well suited name is Rasputin!

Back in 2017, that wily looking animal broke the record for the largest horn spread of any living goat, which measured a whopping 53.23 inches from tip to pointy tip. That’s about the same size as an average 9 year old boy! While they look like they could cause a world of damage, Rasputin is reportedly a very nice goat who’s never hurt anyone with his humongous headgear.

Rhino Horns

It’s not just sheep, goats, and antelope that sport serious horns. Roaming rhinoceros arguably have some of the most famous horns in the world! And they grow those fantastical facial fonts thanks to their ancestor the Elasmotherium. That pre-historic giant is thought to have reached almost 10 ft at the shoulder, with a humongous horn that could measure over 6 ½ ft from base to tip!

Although they’re long extinct, their rhino relatives still sport horns, the largest of which can be found in two species from the African plains: the black rhino and white rhino. Black rhinos both male and female boast two horns, with the more prominent one at the tip of their nose reaching an average 1.6 ft long!

But their cousins the White Rhinos take first place with horns that can grow a fantastical 5 ft long! Unlike the keratin covered bone found in other horned species, the core of the Rhinoceros horn is made of calcium deposits and melanin.

Being slightly softer than bone, the horn gets its curved shape when the Rhino rubs it against the ground! Though when they’re not busy molding them, they use their horns to defend their territory, forage for food, and even dig for water! But, sadly, their huge horns also make them huge targets for poachers.

For hundreds of years, rhino horns have baselessly been thought to contain aphrodisiac powers, and ruthlessly lusty humans will pay anything to get their hands on them. Just one pound of horn can be sold for a staggering $3,000 on the black market! And with a male rhino known as a bull carrying an average of 22 lbs. of horn, that makes them very valuable targets indeed.

But that greed has pushed the black rhino population to critical endangerment, with white rhinos also near threatened! To save them from being killed just for their horns, some conservationists like those in Phinda reserve, South Africa, have taken to removing their rhinos horns entirely!

Saving Rhinos, one horn at a time by Mary Rolph Lamontagne

Using a huge chainsaw, they cut through both the tranquilized rhino’s horns at the base before covering the sites with a protective layer of tar. It’ll undoubtedly have saved the life of that rhino from problematic poachers, but doesn’t that kind of extremities just break your heart?

Ibex Mountain Goats

The brilliant, backwards curling horns of the Ibex mountain goats are impossible not to gawk at! Those colossal curves are shared by seven different types of ibex, all of which sit under the Capra genus, the same as the Markhor goats!

And just like the Markhor, those nimble creatures are adept at clambering over the steep, rocky terrains of mountains all over the world. But unlike the Markhors wide hooves, Ibex hooves have sharp edges and bowl shaped undersides that act like suction cups to help them grip the sides of the cliffs.

Some, like the Alpine Ibex, are so adept that they can even climb up near vertical structures, like damns, to graze on essential salts and nutrient rich lichens! And that’s made even more impressive when you learn that it’s on those impossibly steep slopes that the male Ibex lock horns and fight for the right to breed with the females.

Because of their precarious situation, instead of charging at one another, they’ll raise themselves onto their hind legs and smash their horns into their opponent. Obviously for the Ibex that means the bigger the horns, the better their chances of getting a girlfriend!

Ibex Fight for Mating Rituals | Wild Arabia | BBC Earth by BBC Earth

And while most Ibex horns average between 2 ½ to 4 ft long, the horns of the Asiatic Ibex can reach a phenomenal 5 ft in length! Considering they only measure about 3 ½ ft at the shoulders, that makes their horns longer than the Ibex are high! That may still be small compared to an average sized human, but if you ever tried to face off against one of those on the top of a mountain, you wouldn’t have great odds!

Buffalo Horns

First off, let’s get one thing clear: a bison and a buffalo are two different animal's! Even though the bison is sometimes called an American buffalo, it belongs firmly in the bison species. Fortunately, real buffalos more than make up for that misnomer.

There are two separate members of the bovine family: the African or Cape Buffalo, and the Asian water buffalo. Standing up to 5 ft tall at the shoulder, and weighing up to 1,910 lbs, the African water buffalo is roughly the height and size of a small car! And can you believe its actually the smaller of the two?

Its Asian cousin can reach a staggering 2,650 lbs, some of which comes from the weight of the truly colossal horns atop its head. Both males and females bear those incredible backwards curving horns, although the males are usually larger, and can spread upwards of a phenomenal 47 inches in total!

Although back in 1955, the Guinness World Records recorded that one bull had a shocking span of 166 inches tip to tip making them the longest horns ever recorded! For a perspective, that’s about the same length as two Shaquille O’Neil’s laid end to end although, hopefully, they weighed a little less!

While the Asian Water Buffalo holds the title for longest horns, the Cape buffalo has its own unique traits. Unlike any other animal, the males have curled horns that join at the center of their head in a bony plate called a "boss". That acts like a protective helmet when they spar with one another for mating rights, with the winner walking away with all the ladies in tow.

Watusi Bull

Just about everyone knows that when it comes to cows, if you mess with a bull, you get the horns! But despite the utterly immense size of the African Watusi’s horns, you won’t have to worry about that bull being all that aggressive. Those incredible creatures are a domesticated breed of cattle that sometimes act more like dogs than they do cows!

One, named Oliver from Humble, Texas, is particularly fond of getting pats like a hilariously oversized Labrador! He’s particularly fond of having the back of his head scratched, as it’s one of the places on his body his huge horns prevent him from reaching!

Oliver the African Watusi makes a surprise visit to Atascocita Petco by Houston Chronicle

But how come the horns of those wonderous Watusi are so huge in the first place? While the bulls occasionally use them to spar with other males, and the females use them to help defend their calves, they’re more than just unwieldy weapons!

The thing is, those horns don’t just contain solid bone, but a matrix of epithelium, which is a kind of membrane tissue. That is lined with blood vessels which constantly circulate the Watusi’s blood and disperse a lot of its excess heat.

In their native African climates, which have summers that can reach a roasting 120 degrees Fahrenheit, that heat dispersion is essential for keeping them cool! So, the bigger the horns, the cooler those cattle are in more ways than one!

At their largest, those can be over 6 ½ feet in length! But for one Watusi, named Lurch, it wasn’t the length of his horns that made him a big deal. That steer which is the name for a castrated bull has horns that measured in a at a whopping 3 ft 1.5 inches in circumference, giving him the girthiest horns on the planet!

Texas Longhorn

They say that “everything’s bigger in Texas”, and that’s proven by the existence of the Texas Longhorn no prizes for guessing where it gets its name from! Like the Watusi, those brilliant bovines are a domesticated breed of cattle. Although unlike their African counterparts, they’ve specifically adapted to the environment of North America.

But there’s one of them that really stands out from the rest of the heard! Poncho, an eight year old Longhorn who really lives up to the name of his breed! From tip to pointy tip, Poncho’s rack spans an impossibly impressive 10 ft 7.4 inches! That’s more than twice the width of a concert grand piano and is even wider than the Statue of Liberty’s face!

According to the Guinness World Records, that means Poncho has the largest horn spread of any steer in history, making him something of a celebrity. But for all that deadly looking span, Poncho is as soft as his hide!

Since he was bought by his owners, the Pope family, back in 2014, he’s grown into a gentle giant who’s also incredibly smart. Over the years he’s learned exactly where the tips of his horns are, and maneuvers around the trees on his farm by tipping his head!

Antlers VS Horns

Horns aren’t the only fancy headdresses in the animal kingdom. Antlers are a kind of paired, branched structure that also develop on top of a creature’s cranium. But where a horn has an outer layer made entirely of keratin, antlers are made almost completely out of bone.

As they develop, the antlers are protected by a soft, hair like covering known as velvet which is comprised of blood vessels and nerves. Then, as a result of hormonal and environmental changes, the growing, spongey bone of the new antler begins to harden and thicken. And by scraping the antlers against trees and bushes, the velvet gradually falls away.

Although, all that newly exposed bone often leaves those majestic creatures looking like they just butted their way out of hell! But for some, the process is a little worse than that. Whitetail deer males known as bucks are coveted by hunters for the size of their antler racks. Back in 2017, this world record breaking rack in the image below, with 47 spectacular protrusions was worth approximately $100,000!

To get racks of those sizes, deer raised on farms for hunters are selectively bred and sometimes even in-bred to produce the biggest racks possible. But as you can see that can go horribly wrong. Those terribly disfigured antlers look like a mutation out of a sci-fi film rather than a real life ranch! So, while most bucks have 8 to 10 points over two antlers, badly bred bucks like this one in the image below, can have more than 50 peculiar points!

Fortunately, unlike horns, antlers are shed and regrown every year in line with their mating seasons. So, luckily, those poor bucks won’t be carrying those arduous antlers around forever!

Bucks With Wild Antlers

Unfortunately, it’s not just bad breeding practices that can cause an animal to grow some seriously abnormal antlers! The hormone testosterone plays a huge role in antler development, with more testosterone giving the bucks bigger and stronger antlers in general.

Testosterone is primarily produced by the creature’s crown jewels. But if those are somehow damaged by trauma or disease, it can affect the deer’s testosterone levels. And the knock on effect that can have to their antlers is buck wild, to say the least.

Without the yearly fluctuations of testosterone, the velvet on those antlers continues growing all year round, causing uncontrollable globs of velvet to merge and form strange cactus like structures. And what’s even worse is that without that crucial drop in testosterone at the end of the mating season, those antlers aren’t always shed!

That can lead to years and years of velvet accumulation, like this poor buck in the picture below, clearly suffered from. It looks more like it’s wearing a British bearskin hat than a pair of antlers! They may not be the biggest, but they’re definitely some of the oddest animal headdresses you’ll ever see.

Narwhals

Narwhals are, arguably, one of the most well known species inhabiting the deep blue sea, even though many people have never seen one! With its body reaching lengths of up to 20 ft long, the pretty, pale colored porpoise is a magical sight to behold. But the reason they’ve become so iconic is thanks to that huge spiraling horn jutting out the front of their heads.

While that peculiar protrusion has given the Narwhals the nickname of "The unicorn of the sea", it’s not as many people believe any kind of horn. It is in fact an overgrown spiralized tooth, so it’s closer to something like an elephant tusk rather than a rhino horn!

Not only that, but narwhals can have two of those tremendous teeth, which can grow up to 10 ft long each. But what exactly does the Narwhal use them for? Amazingly, scientists don’t actually know. What they do know is that they’re incredibly sensitive, with up to 10 million nerve endings on the outside of each one.

Some scientists believe that sensitivity can help them pick up changes in their environment, like shifts in the saltwater content of the frigid Arctic Seas or helping them find food. But others believe the tooth is used to attract mates, as it’s usually only found in males. It’s also been observed that Narwhals use their spear like tooth for hunting, although they don’t go around skewering their prey like a shish kebab!

Video evidence shows male Narwhals swimming through the icy artic waters, flicking their horns into unsuspecting fish. Stunned, the fish remain motionless as the Narwhal proceed to gobble them up! But even then, growing a 10 ft horn just to tap a few fish seems like overkill, right? As such, scientists are still stumped as to the true purpose of the Narwhals tusk.

The first-ever footage of Narwhals using their tusks for feeding by Fisheries and Oceans Canada

I hope you were amazed at the animals with the biggest horns in the world! Thanks for reading.