AI overview
A saiga is a stocky, medium-sized antelope with a distinctive elongated nose, found in the grasslands and deserts of Central Asia. This species matters because its populations have experienced dramatic declines due to poaching and habitat loss, making it an important focus for conservation efforts.
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Taxonomy · GBIF
GENUS
- KingdomAnimalia
- PhylumChordata
- ClassMammalia
- OrderArtiodactyla
- FamilyBovidae
via GBIF · CC0
Article
The saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica, /ˈsaɪɡə/) 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