The snow sheep (Ovis nivicola), or Siberian bighorn sheep, is a species of sheep from the mountainous areas in the northeast of Siberia. One subspecies, the Putorana snow sheep (Ovis nivicola borealis), lives isolated from the other forms on the Putorana Plateau.
Subspecies Kolyma snow sheep, O. n. ssp Koryak snow sheep, O. n. koriakorum Okhotsk snow sheep, O. n. alleni Yakutian snow sheep, O. n. lydekkeri Kamchatkan snow sheep, O. n. nivicola Putorana snow sheep, O. n. borealis Chukotka snow sheep, O. n. tschuktschorum
Taxonomy and genetics Ovis nivicola appeared about 600,000 years ago. A number of these wild sheep crossed the Bering Land Bridge (Beringia), from Siberia into Alaska, during the Pleistocene epoch (about 750,000 years ago); new and extant lineages were created from this migration, notably the North American Dall sheep (or thin-horn sheep) and the bighorn sheep, the two which O. nivicola is most closely related to.
Currently the mitochondrial genome of Ovis nivicola has been completely mapped out.Dotsev, A. V. et al. "The First Complete Mitochondrial Genomes Of Snow Sheep (Ovis Nivicola) And Thinhorn Sheep (Ovis Dalli) And Their Phylogenetic Implications For The Genus Ovis". Mitochondrial DNA Part B, vol 4, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1332-1333. Informa UK Limited,
A first-draft genome assembly exists for Ovis nivicola.Maulik Upadhyay, Andreas Hauser, Elisabeth Kunz, Stefan Krebs, Helmut Blum, Arsen Dotsev, Innokentiy Okhlopkov, Vugar Bagirov, Gottfried Brem, Natalia Zinovieva, Ivica Medugorac, The First Draft Genome Assembly of Snow Sheep (Ovis nivicola), Genome Biology and Evolution, Volume 12, Issue 8, August 2020, Pages 1330–1336, https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evaa124
References
External links
Ovis nivicola, Snow Sheep, on ultimateungulate.com