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This article was published in Saiga News Issue 20 on page 28.
During the Pleistocene, the saiga antelope, a nomadic, non-territorial, herding species, inhabited vast areas of Eurasia and North America; its distribution was at its maximum extent in the last glaciation.
Now, it is restricted to a few isolated populations in Central Asia. Two main forms of saiga were recognised: Saiga borealis and S. tatarica. The former became extinct at the beginning of the Holocene, the latter has survived since the Pleistocene to the present. They are regarded either as two species or as two subspecies of S.