• Korean Journal of Environment and Ecology
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.39-47
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• 2016

Recently, it has been reported that morphologically and genetically different two Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus, Pallas, 1771), in Mainland and in Jeju island. Until now, this roe deer has not been clearly taxonomy of Siberian roe deer in Korean peninsula. So, the aim of this study was to compare the skull morphometrics of mainland and Jeju roe deer to obtain more information on the species status of C. pygargus and study the distribution of roe deer subspecies in this region. A total of 50 skulls of adult roe deer was compared and analyzed. The maximum skull length, condylo-basal length, basilar length, maximum skull width, cheek-bone width, interorbital width, rostrum length, length of upper tooth row from the Siberian roe deer in Jeju island were significantly smaller than those of the deer in mainland. Length of the skull was the principal factor of interpopulational variability in roe deer. Variation was not distributed along latitude, longitude, or elevation, but those factors did influence the variation through effects on primary production, which in turn caused isolated differences in skull morphology apparently related to types of forage selected by roe deer in various geographic areas. According to the analysis results of the skull characters, Mainland roe deer was more similar to C. p. tianschanicus which is a subspecies of Siberian roe deer. In addition, Jeju roe deer showed distinct differences compared to European roe deer, 3 subspecies of Siberian roe deer, so it appeared that they could be a unique native species inhabited only in Jeju Island. Because Siberian roe deer in Jeju Island can be classified at subspecies level in this study.

• Animal Systematics, Evolution and Diversity
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.169-176
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• 2000

As one of researches to clarify the taxonomic status of roe deer from Jeju island (C. pygargus tianschanicus), we analyzed partial sequences of mtDNA cytochrome b gene from six roe deers at Jeju island in Korea. Maximum nucleotide Tamura & Nei's distance among three haplotypes was 0.005, and this distance was comparable to the diversity within other roe deer subspecies: it is suggested that roe deers from the mainland dispersed rarely to Jejudo Island, although further analyses are ne-cessary to decide whether or not it was occurred by human introduction. Furthermore, nucleotide distance between cytochrome b sequences of roe deers from Jeju (C. pygargus tianschanicus) and the sequence of roe deer from west Siberia(C. p. pygargus), obtained from GenBank, was average 0.013, and it is suggested that C. p. tianschanicus diverged from C. p. pygargus of west Siberia 0.65 Myr ago.