A subspecies of tigers, Panthera Tirgris Virgata or more commonly dubbed as the Caspian Tiger went extinct back in the 1960s, these mammoth sized wild cats could weigh more than 136 kilograms and were amongst the category of largest cats to have ever existed.
Now according to a new study in the widely acclaimed scientific journal Biological Conservation the said Caspian Tiger, could very well be brought from the dead owing to the discovery of another subspecies of tigers found in the callous eastern bloc of mother Russia.
A multinational team of researchers partially sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has plans to get into captivity a handful of these genetically similar subspecies of tigers and introduce them back again to Central Asia.
The Caspian Tiger saw its decline as Russia colonized several central Asian countries, which in turn disrupted their native forestry habitats as they rapidly converted to cropland and the icing on the cake being the wild hunting carried out by sportsmen and military personnel for recreation and training purposes.
Intriguingly genetic analysis of the said another subspecies, which is the Siberian (Amur) variant found in Russia, revealed that the two subspecies had but just recently diverged into different lineage from a common ancestor relatively not too late. Albeit, labeled Endangered this Siberian Tiger still lives in the remote mountain region of Sikhote Alin and the Primorye province of Russia.
This genetic mapping project discovered that the common ancestor of both subspecies colonized Central Asia via a path along the Silk Road from eastern China about 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice-age.
The Caspian and Siberian Tigers are thought to be essentially indistinguishable by scientists on a genetic level and the lateral is thought to be just the piece of the puzzle needed to breed back the Caspian Tiger.
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