Saiga Antelope
| Saiga antelope | |
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_Saiga_tatarica.png) |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | Bovidae |
| Subfamily: | Antilopinae |
| Genus: |
Saiga Gray, 1843 |
| Species: | S. tatarica |
| Binomial name | |
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Saiga tatarica (Linnaeus, 1766) |
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| Reconstructed range (white) and current distribution of the two subspecies Saiga tatarica tatarica (green) and S. t. mongolica (red). | |
| Synonyms | |
The saiga antelope (/ˈsaɪɡə/, Saiga tatarica) is a critically endangered antelope that originally inhabited a vast area of the Eurasian steppe zone from the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains and Caucasus into Dzungaria and Mongolia.
They also lived in Beringian North America during the . Today, the dominant subspecies (S. t. tatarica) is only found in one location in Russia (in The Republic of Kalmykia) and three areas in Kazakhstan (the Ural, Ustiurt and Betpak-Dala populations). A proportion of the Ustiurt population migrates south to Uzbekistan and occasionally Turkmenistan in winter. It is extinct in People's Republic of China and southwestern Mongolia. It was hunted extensively in Romania and Moldova until it became extinct in those regions in the end of the 18th century. The Mongolian subspecies (S. t. mongolica) is found only in western Mongolia.
The scientific name of the saiga is Saiga tatarica. It is the sole extant member of its genus and is classified under the family Bovidae. This species was first described by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae (1766). Linnaeus gave it the name Capra tatarica. The relation between the saiga and the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii) have long been debated. English zoologist Reginald Innes Pocock classified them under different subfamilies in 1910. In 1945, American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson classified both in the tribe Saigini under the same subfamily, Caprinae. Subsequent authors were not certain about the relationship between the two, till phylogenetic studies in the 1990s revealed that though morphologically similar, the Tibetan antelope is closer to Caprinae while the saiga is closer to Antilopinae.
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Wikipedia