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Concept
Saiga antelope
Summary
The saiga antelope (ˈsaɪɡə, Saiga tatarica), or saiga, is an antelope which is critically endangered, and 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, they ranged across the mammoth steppe from the British Isles to Beringian North America. Today, the dominant subspecies (S. t. tatarica) is only found in one region in Russia (in the Republic of Kalmykia and Astrakhan Oblast) and three areas in Kazakhstan (the Ural, Ustiurt, and Betpak-Dala populations). A portion of the Ustiurt population migrates south to Uzbekistan and occasionally Turkmenistan in winter. Notable for a distinctively large proboscis amongst its kind, it is extirpated from China, Ukraine, and southwestern Mongolia. The Mongolian subspecies (S. t. mongolica) is found only in western Mongolia.
The scientific name Capra tatarica was coined by Carl Linnaeus in 1766 in the 12th edition of Systema Naturae. It was reclassified as Saiga tatarica and is the sole living member of the genus Saiga. Two subspecies are recognised:
S. t. tatarica (Linnaeus, 1766): also known as the Russian saiga, it occurs in central Asia.
S. t. mongolica Bannikov, 1946: also known as the Mongolian saiga, it is sometimes treated as an independent species, or as subspecies of the Pleistocene Saiga borealis; it is confined to Mongolia.
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, until phylogenetic studies in the 1990s revealed that though morphologically similar, the Tibetan antelope is closer to the Caprinae while the saiga is closer to the Antilopinae.
In a revision of the phylogeny of the tribe Antilopini on the basis of nuclear and mitochondrial data in 2013, Eva Verena Bärmann (of the University of Cambridge) and colleagues showed that the saiga is sister to the clade formed by the springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis) and the gerenuk (Litocranius walleri).
Official source
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