page_title: Saiga antelope
section_title: Evolution
hierarchical_section_title: Saiga antelope / Evolution
caption_attribution_description: English: A saiga antelope skull and taxidermy mount on display at the Museum of Osteology, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
context_page_description: The saiga antelope, or saiga, is a critically endangered 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, they also occurred in Beringian North America and the British Isles. Today, the dominant subspecies is only found in one region in Russia and three areas in Kazakhstan. A portion of the Ustiurt population migrates south to Uzbekistan and occasionally Turkmenistan in winter. It is extinct in China and southwestern Mongolia. It was hunted extensively in Romania and Moldova until it became extinct in those regions at the end of the 18th century. The Mongolian subspecies is found only in western Mongolia.
context_section_description: Fossils of saiga, concentrated mainly in central and northern Eurasia, date to as early as the late Pleistocene (nearly 0.1 Mya). An extinct species of Saiga, S. borealis, has been identified from the Pleistocene of northern Eurasia. Fossils excavated from the Buran Kaya III site (Crimea) date back to the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene. The morphology of saiga does not seem to have changed significantly since prehistoric times.
  Before the Holocene, the saiga ranged from as far west as modern-day England and France to as far east as northern Siberia, Alaska, and probably Canada. The antelope gradually entered the Urals, though it did not colonise southern Europe. A 2010 study revealed that a steep decline has occurred in the genetic variability of the saiga since the late Pleistocene-Holocene, probably due to a population bottleneck.
caption: Saiga antelope skull and taxidermy mount on display at the Museum of Osteology
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