Sumatran tiger
It would seem that we only don't know about dumb animals in general and about tigers in particular. For a long time included in the Red List, they are everywhere registered and under strict control not only professional naturalists, owners of national reserves, but also the international organizations. In some areas of the planet where tigers live, them it is observed from satellites that allows to trace better ways of their migration and living conditions. Nevertheless the discovery made recently by group of the American zoologists under the leadership of professor Joel Krakraf from the Museum of natural history in New York caused sensation in scientific community and showed that we know not everyone about striped predators. By means of genetic engineering scientists managed to establish that on the Indonesian island of Sumatra there live some tigers of the unknown before breed.
According to the classification accepted in science they received the name Panthera sumatras and are carried to subspecies related by it the animals living on islands of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike the continental colleagues, they have peculiar only to them the genetic features expressed in habits, behavior, in appearance. At more careful inspection it was established that they have partially other coloring, a bit different arrangement of dark strips on a trunk. Some features of a structure of a body are noticed.
Opening threatens to change former understanding about life of this remarkable animal. It is considered to be that originally tigers lived only in continental Asia - in an extensive zone from the Caucasus to Cupid, and then were settled on the world, migrating to other areas. "Development" of southeast part of the continent happened in times when this region represented a whole with Eurasia, that is before increase of global sea level and formation of numerous archipelagoes - about 12 thousand years ago. From here and quite conditional division into types and subspecies - on so-called to "a geographical sign". There are tigers Amur, or Siberian, Chinese, Bengalese, Turonian, Caucasian... All these representatives of huge family in general close relatives as throughout the past millennia had opportunity to communicate with each other, to keep uniform genetic system and structure of a molecule of DNA which is responsible for heredity.
Perhaps, once and tigers from the island of Sumatra consisted in close relationship with tribespeople of Siberia. Now, scientists from the New York museum believe, they those aren't. Too long isolation on limited vital space - within separately taken island led to "freezing" of a genetic code, its preservation in that look what it was in prehistoric times. In fact, Joel Krakraf considers, we deal with the most thoroughbred tiger today and have to keep this uniqueness.
The problem of preservation of tigers is particularly acute in all regions where they still are found. In comparison with the last century the livestock of these animals was reduced by 95 percent. Here and there their merciless destruction proceeds. The most large number of tigers lives in India today. This country contains about 30 reserves. The few less than one and a half thousand striped predators live in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, China and Burma. Still in the sixties the last century population of the Chinese tiger reached 4 thousand heads, and now them is about 80. By estimates of the World union on conservation, no more than 200 Amur tigers roam about a Far East taiga. For the last decades the tigers from the islands of Java, Bali, and also the Turonian tiger representing separate subspecies disappeared.