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The Caspian tiger was a Panthera tigris tigris population native to eastern Turkey, northern Iran, Mesopotamia, the Caucasus around the Caspian Sea, Central Asia to northern Afghanistan and the Xinjiang region in western China. Until the Middle Ages, it was also present in southern Russia. It inhabited sparse forests and riverine corridors in this region until the 1970s. This population was regarded as a distinct subspecies and assessed as extinct in 2003.
Results of a Phylogeography analysis evinces that the Caspian and Siberian tiger populations shared a common continuous geographic distribution until the early 19th century.
Some Caspian tigers were intermediate in size between Siberian and .
It was also called Balkhash tiger, tiger, tiger, and Mazandaran tiger.
In 1929, Reginald Innes Pocock subordinated the tiger to the genus Panthera. For several decades, the Caspian tiger was considered a distinct tiger subspecies.
In 1999, the validity of several tiger subspecies was questioned. 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. Morphologically, tigers from different regions vary little, and gene flow between populations in those regions is considered to have been possible during the Pleistocene. 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.
At the start of the 21st century, genetics studies were carried out using 20 tiger bone and tissue samples from museum collections and Sequencing DNA at least one segment of five mitochondrial genes. Results revealed a low amount of variability in the mitochondrial DNA in Caspian tigers; and that Caspian and Siberian tigers were remarkably similar, indicating that the Siberian tiger is the genetically closest living relative of the Caspian tiger. Phylogeographic analysis indicates that the common ancestor of Caspian and Siberian tigers colonized Central Asia via the Gansu−Silk Road region from eastern China less than 10,000 years ago, and subsequently traversed eastward to establish the Siberian tiger population in the Russian Far East. 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.
In 2015, morphological, ecological and molecular traits of all putative tiger subspecies were analysed in a combined approach. Results support distinction of the two evolutionary groups continental and Sunda tigers. The authors proposed recognition of only two subspecies, namely P. t. tigris comprising the Bengal, Malayan, Indochinese, South Chinese, Siberian and Caspian tiger populations, and P. t. sondaica comprising the Javan tiger, Bali tiger and Sumatran tiger populations. Tigers in mainland Asia fall into two , namely a northern clade formed by the Caspian and Siberian tiger populations, and a southern clade formed by populations in remaining mainland Asia.
In 2017, the Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and now recognizes the tiger populations in continental Asia as P. t. tigris. However, a genetic study published in 2018 supported six monophyletic , with the Amur and Caspian tigers being distinct from other mainland Asian populations, thus supporting the traditional concept of six living subspecies.
Some individuals attained exceptional sizes. 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. Its head-to-body length was . Its skull had a condylobasal length of about , and Zygomatic bone width of . Its skull length was , hence more than the known maximum of for this population, and slightly exceeding skull length of most Siberian tigers. In Prishibinske, a tiger was killed in February 1899. Measurements after skinning revealed a body length of between the pegs, plus a long tail, giving it a total length of about . Measurements between the pegs of up to are known. It was said to have been "a tiger of immense proportions" and "no smaller than the local horse breeds." It had rather long fur.
Skull size and shape of Caspian tigers significantly overlap with and are almost indistinguishable from other tiger specimens in mainland Asia.
Its former distribution can be approximated by examining the distribution of in the region.
Wild boar was the numerically dominant ungulate in forested habitats, along watercourses, in 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. Red Deer and roe deer occurred in forests around the Black Sea to the western side and around the southern side of the Caspian Sea in a narrow belt of forest cover. Roe deer occurred in forested areas south of Lake Balkhash. 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.Throughout the late Pleistocene and Holocene, the Caspian tiger population was likely connected to the Bengal tiger population through corridors below elevations of in the Hindu Kush, before gene flow was interrupted by humans.
Until the early 20th century, the regular Russian Empire army was used to clear from forests, around settlements, and potential agricultural lands. Until World War I, about 50 tigers were killed in the forests of Amu Darya and each year. High incentives were paid for tiger skins up to 1929. 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. 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.
In Turkey, a pair of tigers was allegedly killed in the area of Selçuk in 1943. Several tiger skins found in the early 1970s near Uludere indicated the presence of a tiger population in eastern Turkey. Questionnaire surveys conducted in this region revealed that one to eight tigers were killed each year until the mid-1980s, and that tigers likely had survived in the region until the early 1990s. Due to lack of interest, in addition to security and safety reasons, no further field surveys were carried out in the area.
In Iran, one of the last known tigers was shot in Golestan National Park in 1953. Another individual was sighted in Golestān Province in 1958. In Turkmenistan, the last known tiger was killed in January 1954 in the Sumbar River valley in the Kopet-Dag Range. It reportedly disappeared in the Manasi River basin in the Tian Shan Range west of Ürümqi in the 1960s. 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. The Piandj River area between Afghanistan and Tajikistan was a stronghold of the Caspian tiger until the late 1960s. The latest sighting of a tiger in the Afghan-Tajik border area dates to 1998 in the Babatag Range. Two tigers were captured in April 1997 in Afghanistan's Laghman Province.
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 May 2006, a Kazakh hunter claimed to have seen a female Caspian tiger with cubs near Lake Balkhash. However, this sighting remains uncertain and unconfirmed.
In Iran, Caspian tigers had been protected since 1957, with heavy fines for shooting. In the early 1970s, biologists from the Department of Environment searched several years for Caspian tigers in the uninhabited areas of Caspian forests, but did not find any evidence of their presence.
While the restoration of the Caspian tiger has stimulated discussions, the locations for the tiger have yet to become fully involved in the planning. But through preliminary ecological surveys it has been revealed that some small populated areas of Central Asia have preserved natural habitat suitable for tigers.
In autumn 2023, two captive tigers from the Netherlands had arrived at the Ile-Balkhash Nature Reserve in Kazakhstan, and another three to four tigers are expected to be introduced from Russia.
In the Fables of Pilpay, the tiger is described as furious and avid to rule over wilderness.
The babr (, tiger) features in Persian and Central Asian culture. The name "Babr Mazandaran" is sometimes given to a prominent Wrestling. A Syrian mosaic in Palmyra depicts the Sassanids as tigers, possibly commemorating the victory of the Palmyrene King Odaenathus over Shapur I. The inscription on the mosaic conceals an earlier one that read: (Mrn), which is a title used by Odaenathus. It possibly celebrates Odaenathus' victory over the Persians, the archer representing Odaenathus and the tigers the Persians; Odaenathus is about to be crowned with victory by the eagle flying above him.
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