However, with so few wild camels, what the natural genetic diversity within a population would have been is not clear. Īs many as three regions in the genetic makeup are distinctly different from Bactrian camels, with up to a 3% difference in the base genetic code.
This population is distinct from domesticated herds both in genetic makeup and in behavior. In particular, a population of wild Bactrian camel has been discovered to live within a part of the Gashun Gobi region of the Gobi Desert. 652) and there is no evidence to suggest that the original range of C. ferus included those parts of Central Asia and Iran where some of the earliest Bactrian remains have been found. Zoological opinion nowadays tends to favour the idea that C. bactrianus and C. dromedarius are descendants of two different subspecies of C. ferus (Peters and von den Driesch 1997: p.
The wild Bactrian camel ( Camelus ferus) was first described by Nikolay Przhevalsky in the late 19th century and has now been established as a distinct species from the Bactrian camel ( Camelus bactrianus). However, a 1994 analysis of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene revealed that the species display 10.3% divergence in their sequences. The fertility of their hybrid has given rise to speculation that the Bactrian camel and the dromedary should be merged into a single species with two varieties. Where the ranges of the two species overlap, such as in northern Punjab, Iran and Afghanistan, the phenotypic differences between them tend to decrease as a result of extensive crossbreeding between them. The Bactrian camel and the dromedary often interbreed to produce fertile offspring. However, the fossil record suggests a far more recent divergence between the Bactrian camel and the dromedary because despite a moderately rich fossil record of camelids, no fossil that fits within this divergence is older than middle Pleistocene (about 0.8 Ma). Nearly 2 million years later, the Bactrian camel and the dromedary emerged as two independent species. Speciation began first in Lamini as the alpaca came into existence 10 million years ago. The study revealed that the two tribes had diverged 25 million years ago (early Miocene), notably earlier than what had been previously estimated from North American fossils. In 2007, Peng Cui (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and colleagues carried out a phylogenetic study of the evolutionary relationships between the two tribes of Camelidae: Camelini – consisting of the three Camelus species (the study considered the wild Bactrian camel as a subspecies of the Bactrian camel) – and Lamini – consisting of the alpaca ( Vicugna pacos), the guanaco ( Lama guanicoe), the llama ( L. glama) and the vicuña ( V. vicugna). The Bactrian camel was given its current binomial name Camelus bactrianus by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 publication Systema Naturae.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first European to describe the camels: In his 4th century BCE History of Animals he identified the one-humped Arabian camel and the two-humped Bactrian camel.
The Bactrian camel belongs to the family Camelidae. The Bactrian camel shares the genus Camelus with the dromedary ( C. dromedarius) and the wild Bactrian camel ( C. ferus). Phylogenetic relationships of the Camelids from combined analysis of all molecular data. 1.1 Differences from wild Bactrian camels.
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