The collection of specimens that you can enjoy at the HKBM is diverse, and in some cases, we display only body parts, such as a head, a foot or in the case of today’s species a single horn🦄. The horn on the picture belongs to a species of antelope🐏 named saiga, 𝘚𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘢 𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢 (Linnaeus, 1766). They are ungulates (mammals with hooves) that travel in large herds and migrate long distances across different terrains including deserts, steppes and grasslands.
The saiga antelope is easily recognized by its humped, gelatinous nose👃 which hangs on top of its mouth, which gives it a look seemingly coming from a Star Wars movie. In summer, the mucous membranes in their noses help to filter out the dust accumulated by the herd when migrating. The elongated nostril also provides efficiency in cooling down the animal body temperature in summer, while it helps to warm up the cold air before reaching the lungs in winter. This is a great adaptation for an animal to regulate its body temperature👍.
Saiga antelope used to be found across the Eurasian steppe. Today, they are restricted to one Russian region and three areas in Kazakhstan. Their population has decreased by 95% over the last 15 years with an estimate of 1 million individuals back in the 1990s😔. Surprisingly, one of the reasons for their decline is the decline of other species: the rhinoceros and the ban on their horn trade in 1993🦏. Saiga horn is composed of keratin (the same substance as human hair and nails) and is believed to have similar medicinal values to treat fever and respiratory diseases as rhino horns while being much cheaper. As only male saiga antelopes have distinct horns, their targeted hunting has created a large sex imbalance within populations, leading to local extinctions in several regions😩.
Additionally, in 2015, a massive die-off due to an infectious disease (probably pasteurellosis) occurred, killing in just a few weeks nearly 150,000 individuals or about half of the global population. The specimen we have in HKBM is actually donated by AFCD and was confiscated at customs. Hopefully, we will not come across a specimen collected from this context in the future🙏.
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