Science confirmed 9 species of tigers on Earth, 3 extinct species

Which tiger is not a tiger, why must it be classified?

For years, the community interested in wild research has argued a lot about the story of tiger conservation. In it, the biggest question is more than 4,000 surviving individuals belong to the same species? Is there any difference between the Siberian tiger and the Indonesian tiger?

This is a very important question to answer, because it leaves many deadlock for the conservation of biodiversity for tigers. If the Indonesian Siberian and tiger tigers are different, cross-breeding will confuse the genomes of the two species, leading to incalculable consequences.

And luckily, experts have recently concluded that the number of tigers left on Earth makes 6 species .

The number of tigers left on Earth today is 6 species.

More precisely, we have 9 species, but unfortunately this classification list has come too late, because 3 species have officially become extinct. These are the Persian tiger (1970), the Bali tiger (1937), and the Javan tiger (1976). However, this list will help science to come up with more effective solutions to save living tigers, including Bengal, Amur, Sumatran, Indonesia and Malayan tigers.

"Heterogeneous classification has hindered the recovery of some tigers that are on the brink of extinction," said Shu-Jin Luo, research director from Peking University (Beijing, China). National).

"This is the first study to approach the natural history of tigers from a genetic perspective. It gives us very broad evidence of the origin and evolution of this animal."

To get results, the team analyzed the genome of 32 individual tiger species.

The tiger appeared 2-3 million years ago.

"For the first time we can replicate the evolutionary path of modern tiger species" - cited in the research report. Although biodiversity is still low, these six tiger species are the most evolutionary of the cat species.

Fossil evidence suggests that the tiger appeared 2-3 million years ago . But genetic traces indicate that all tigers refer to a knot about 110,000 years ago - coinciding with a decline in global temperature during the Peleistocene.

At this stage, Panthera tigris tigers begin to branch - or stay in Southeast Asia and China, or move further and evolve to suit the new environment.

As Sumatran tigers have evolved today to possess darker, thicker stripes, their bodies are smaller in order to save energy, as their prey on the island of Sunda is small. In contrast, Amur tigers possess large, lighter-colored bodies to cope with the cold of Russia.

"Understanding the development history of tigers gives us a platform for species identification, providing a more suitable conservation campaign for them" - the study concluded.

The study is published in Current Biology.