This large area includes several distinct regions such as the Mediterranean Basin, parts of North Africa, Arabia, and various parts of Asia. It also has many rivers and lakes that create special freshwater areas for plants and animals.
Although it is mainly in the east, the Palearctic reaches a little into the Western Hemisphere too, from Iceland in the west to Cape Dezhnyov in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in the east. People started using this name in the 1800s, and it is still important today for studying where animals live.
History
In 1858, a British scientist named Philip Sclater wrote a paper where he first described six main areas of the world where animals live. He called these areas zoogeographic realms, and one of them was the Palaearctic. These areas were based on where animals are found and what stops them from moving from one place to another.
Frontispiece to Alfred Russel Wallace's book The Geographical Distribution of Animals
Later, in 1876, another scientist named Alfred Wallace used Sclater's ideas in his book about how animals are spread around the world. The way Sclater divided the world into these areas is still used today, with just a few small changes and the addition of two more areas: Oceania and the Antarctic.
Major ecological regions
The Palearctic realm includes areas with cold northern climates and warmer temperate climates, stretching from western Europe to the Bering Sea.
The largest part of this realm is the Euro-Siberian region. It includes tundra in the far north, huge areas of coniferous forests called taiga, and temperate forests further south. This region shares many plants and animals with similar areas in North America because the two landmasses were connected in the past.
The Mediterranean Basin around the Mediterranean Sea has a special climate with mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers. It is rich in plant life but has lost much of its original forests due to human activities. Deserts such as the Sahara separate this realm from areas further south.
Western and Central Asia feature mixed forests in mountain areas and dry grasslands and deserts elsewhere. East Asia, including China, Korea, and Japan, has rich temperate forests, especially in mountainous regions. The realm also includes important freshwater areas like Europe’s rivers, Russia’s Lake Baikal, and Japan’s Lake Biwa.
Flora and fauna
The Palearctic region is home to special birds like the accentors (Prunellidae), which live only there. Other bird families found in nearby areas include the divers or loons (Gaviidae), grouse (Tetraoninae), auks (Alcidae), and waxwings (Bombycillidae).
While there are no unique mammal groups only in this region, some families are special to it, like the mouse-like hamsters (Calomyscidae), Prolagidae, and red pandas (Ailuridae). Many mammals, such as the brown bear (Ursus arctos), red deer (Cervus elaphus), American bison (Bison bison), and reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), originally lived here and later spread to other places during the Ice Age.
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