Right up until the 1960s, before they went extinct, a subspecies of tiger—and one of the biggest cats to ever live—roamed through Asia. The Caspian tiger, Panthera tirgris virgata, were found primarily in the regions surrounding the Caspian Sea, through Turkey and Iran, and into the Takla Makan Desert in Western China. They typically weighed over 300 pounds and could be as big as 12 feet from tail to skull.

Unbelievably, there’s hope that we might be able to bring them back from the dead. Thanks to research published in the scientific journal Biological Conservation, the hope of resurrection might just be within our grasp.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Russian colonization in Turkestan—a region that includes Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries in Central Asia—led to a severe decline of Caspian tigers. Not only were these magnificent animals hunted for sport, but they lost their habitat and their primary food source of wild pigs.

World Wildlife Fund / Helmut Diller

These conditions culminated in the 1960s, causing the last of the Caspian tigers to die out and officially render the species extinct. Yet there’s hope that this fatal trajectory could be reversed.

Wikipedia

And it’s all thanks to the endangered Siberian tiger population in Russia’s Far East. As luck should have it, the two subspecies diverged from a common ancestor fewer than 10,000 years ago—which is fairly recent in evolutionary terms!

Wikipedia

The two subspecies are so similar that, on a genetic level, they’re nearly indistinguishable. The hope is that, through the Siberian tiger, it would be possible to “breed back” the Caspian tiger.

Wikipedia

Researchers have already picked a habitable spot in Kazakhstan that could support up to 100 tigers in the next 50 years. Prey would have to be reintroduced into the area and each step of the way needs to be monitored, but it’s possible that we could be looking at new Caspian tigers within the next few decades!

Wikipedia

This is such a cool project to think about. It seems accomplishable, and the researchers are pretty confident they could pull it off relatively soon. Who knows? Maybe it’ll work!

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