Saiga

The saiga antelope (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 Mountains, Ustyurt Plateau 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. == Taxonomy and phylogeny == 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 is only to be found today in central Asia. S. t. mongolica Bannikov…