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| Bactrian Camel Status: Critical | ||||||||||||||
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| Camelus bactrianus Linnaeus, 1758 |
The Bactrian Camel (Camelus bactrianus) is a large even-toed ungulate native to the steppes of eastern Asia.
It is thought that the Bactrian Camel was domesticated sometime before 2500 BC, probably in northern Iran or southwestern Turkestan, and that this took place independently of the domestication of the Dromedary.
Nearly all of the estimated 1.4 million Bactrian Camels alive today are domesticated: the largest wild population known to survive is about 1000 animals in the Gobi Desert.