Saiga antelope
Species of antelope / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The saiga antelope (/ˈsaɪɡə/, Saiga tatarica), or saiga, is a species of antelope which during antiquity inhabited a vast area of the Eurasian steppe, spanning the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in the northwest and Caucasus in the southwest into Mongolia in the northeast and Dzungaria in the southeast. During the Pleistocene, it ranged across the mammoth steppe from the British Isles to Beringia. Today, the dominant subspecies (S. t. tatarica) only occurs in Kalmykia and Astrakhan Oblast of Russia and in the Ural, Ustyurt and Betpak-Dala regions of Kazakhstan. A portion of the Ustyurt population migrates south to Uzbekistan and occasionally to Turkmenistan in winter. It is regionally extinct in Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, China and southwestern Mongolia. The Mongolian subspecies (S. t. mongolica) occurs only in western Mongolia.[3][4]
Saiga antelope | |
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A male at the Stepnoi Nature Sanctuary of Astrakhan Oblast, Russia | |
A female at the Askania-Nova Biosphere Reserve of Kakhovka Raion, Ukraine | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Mammalia |
Order: | Artiodactyla |
Family: | Bovidae |
Subfamily: | Antilopinae |
Tribe: | Saigini |
Genus: | Saiga Gray, 1843 |
Species: | S. tatarica |
Binomial name | |
Saiga tatarica (Linnaeus, 1766) | |
Subspecies | |
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Reconstructed range (white) and current distribution of the two subspecies Saiga tatarica tatarica (green) and S. t. mongolica (red). | |
Synonyms[2] | |
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