Saiga fossils in the Southern-Lower Volga of Astrakhan, Russia

Abstract

Conservation of declining migratory species is a challenging task, as the factors that may have determined their past distribution may not determine their extant and future distribution. Saiga tatarica Linnaeus, 1766 is an essential element of faunistic complexes of the Middle and the Late Pleistocene (upper Middle and Upper Neopleistocene according to the Russian stratigraphic scale), and the Holocene of the lower Volga of Astrakhan, Russia (N 46º19’16’’, E 47º59’27’’). Saiga populations have massively declined due to human impacts. It is well known that any endangered and overwhelm antelope species can be recognized and known through the fossils of these species. In this context, fossils of saiga, preserved in collections of he Astrakhan Memorial Museum of Russia, were studied on the basis of comparative analysis of cranial characteristics, to attribute them to the exact species. Some features such as sizes and proportions of fossil skulls were studied through the morphological characters of local fossil population of saiga in the Middle Pleistocene to Holocene. Comparative analysis of cranial characteristics showed that remains fossils of saigas belong to the modern species, S. tatarica. The applied technique of the comparative analysis to determine the gender by cranial measurement of facial part of a skull showed that the fossil AMZ KP 47411 (collected from Khazarian alluvia of village Nikolskoe in 2012) represents a male of S. tatarica. On the other hand, comparison of saiga cranial remains among themselves from different layers of the Late Pleistocene did not show any significant results.

Keywords

• Middle and Late Pleistocene
• Holocene
• saiga
• fossils
• Astrakhan
• Russia