[4] Results of a phylogeographic analysis evinces that the Caspian and Siberian tiger populations shared a common continuous geographic distribution until the early 19th century.

[8] Felis virgata was a scientific name used by Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger in 1815 for the greyish tiger in the area surrounding the Caspian Sea.

[9] Tigris septentrionalis was the scientific name proposed by Konstantin Satunin in 1904 for a skull and mounted skins of tigers that were killed in the Lankaran Lowland in the 1860s.

Most putative subspecies described in the 19th and 20th centuries were distinguished on basis of fur length and colouration, striping patterns and body size, hence characteristics that vary widely within populations.

Therefore, it was proposed to recognize only two tiger subspecies as valid, namely P. t. tigris in mainland Asia, and P. t. sondaica in the Greater Sunda Islands and possibly in Sundaland.

[14] At the start of the 21st century, genetic studies were carried out using 20 tiger bone and tissue samples from museum collections and sequencing at least one segment of five mitochondrial genes.

The Caspian and Siberian tigers were likely a single contiguous population until the early 19th century, but became isolated from another due to fragmentation and loss of habitat during the Industrial Revolution.

[15] In 2017, the Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and now recognizes the tiger populations in continental Asia as P. t.

Pure black patterns were invariably found only on head, neck, the middle of the back and at the tip of the tail.

The summer coat had a similar density and hair length to that of the Bengal tiger, though its stripes were usually narrower, longer and closer set.

In 1954, a tiger was killed near the Sumbar River in Kopet-Dag, whose stuffed skin was put on display in a museum in Ashgabat.

[25] Wild boar was the numerically dominant ungulate in forested habitats, along watercourses, in reed beds and in thickets of the Caspian and Aral Seas.

Where watercourses penetrated deep into desert areas, suitable wild pig and tiger habitat was often linear, only a few kilometers wide at most.

Bactrian deer lived in the narrow belt of forest habitat on the southern border of the Aral Sea, and southward along the Syr-Darya and Amu Darya rivers.

[27] Its extirpation was caused by several factors: Until the early 20th century, the regular Russian army was used to clear predators from forests, around settlements, and potential agricultural lands.

Wild pigs and deer, the prey base of tigers, were decimated by deforestation and subsistence hunting by the increasing human population along the rivers, supported by growing agricultural developments.

[28] By 1910, cotton plants were estimated to occupy nearly one-fifth of Turkestan's arable land, with about one half located in the Fergana Valley.

Due to lack of interest, in addition to security and safety reasons, no further field surveys were carried out in the area.

[2] The last record from the lower reaches of the Amu Darya river was an unconfirmed observation in 1968 near Nukus in the Aral Sea area.

By the early 1970s, tigers disappeared from the river's lower reaches and the Pyzandh Valley in the Turkmen-Uzbek-Afghan border region.

[36] In Kazakhstan, the last Caspian tiger was recorded in 1948, in the environs of the Ili River, the last known stronghold in the region of Lake Balkhash.

In many regions of Central Asia, Bactrian deer and roe deer were important prey species, as well as Caspian red deer and goitered gazelle in Iran; Eurasian golden jackals, jungle cats, locusts, and other small mammals in the lower Amu Darya River area; saigas, wild horses and Persian onagers in the Miankaleh Peninsula; Turkmenian kulans, Mongolian wild asses, and mountain sheep in the Zhana-Darya and around the Aral Sea; and Manchurian wapiti and moose in the area of Lake Baikal.

But through preliminary ecological surveys it has been revealed that some small populated areas of Central Asia have preserved natural habitat suitable for tigers.

[8] A Syrian mosaic in Palmyra depicts the Sassanids as tigers, possibly commemorating the victory of the Palmyrene King Odaenathus over Shapur I.