Caspian Tiger


Panthera tigris virgata

2003

Photograph of a Caspian tiger in Berlin Zoo, ca. 1895 Source

Living in the sparse forests and riverine corridors of eastern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus, and western China until the 1970s --- and, before the Middle Ages, in Ukraine and southern Russia --- this tiger's extinction is entwined with the Russian colonization of Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. It was hunted for sport; the animal's preferred reed-bed habitats were converted to cropland for cotton; and the Russian military was used to clear predators from local forests. We know little about their behavior. Conservation attempts were introduced in Tajikistan in 1938 and Iran in 1957. In the early 1970s, naturalists from the Iranian Department of Environment spent years searching for the Caspian tiger, but did not uncover any evidence of their survival. Described by Virgil and Shakespeare, this species of tiger appears more recently in Alex Dehgan's The Snow Leopard Project and Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation (2009). "The freshness of the Caspian tiger's extinction was disturbing", he writes, "we were so close to being its contemporary."

Aurochs


Bos primigenius
1627

Illustration of an aurochs from Siegmund von Herberstein's Rervm Moscoviticarvm commentarij Sigismundi (1556) Source

Living in the sparse forests and riverine corridors of eastern Turkey, northern Iran, the Caucasus, and western China until the 1970s --- and, before the Middle Ages, in Ukraine and southern Russia --- this tiger's extinction is entwined with the Russian colonization of Turkestan in the late nineteenth century. It was hunted for sport; the animal's preferred reed-bed habitats were converted to cropland for cotton; and the Russian military was used to clear predators from local forests. We know little about their behavior. Conservation attempts were introduced in Tajikistan in 1938 and Iran in 1957. In the early 1970s, naturalists from the Iranian Department of Environment spent years searching for the Caspian tiger, but did not uncover any evidence of their survival. Described by Virgil and Shakespeare, this species of tiger appears more recently in Alex Dehgan's The Snow Leopard Project and Other Adventures in Warzone Conservation (2009). "The freshness of the Caspian tiger's extinction was disturbing", he writes, "we were so close to being its contemporary."