Golovachev Mikhail Vladimirovich, Lozovskaya Marina Viacheslavovna, Akbar Hossain, and Matveev Andrey Viktorovich

pp. 27 - 35

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.