Details
Camelus bactrianus
The Bactrian camel is the largest living camel, a two-humped giant of the Central Asian deserts and steppes. Fat stored in its twin humps and a thick woolly coat let it endure extremes from −30°C to 50°C. Domesticated around 2500 BCE, it has long been the workhorse of the Silk Road caravans.
Map: Ecoregions 2017 © RESOLVE (CC BY 4.0) · Natural Earth (PD)
It ranges across the arid Palearctic, centred on the Gobi Desert, moving between rocky mountain massifs, open steppe, stony plains, and sand dunes.
A heavy animal roughly 220–350 cm long and 300–690 kg, it carries two fat-filled humps on its back. The shaggy coat shades from dark brown to sandy beige, with neck and shoulder hairs reaching up to 25 cm. Long eyelashes, sealable nostrils, and two broad spreading toes are all adaptations to wind-driven sand.
It is active by day, foraging in daylight and resting in the open at night. Animals live in small family herds of one bull with several females and their young.
A herbivore, it chews the cud and copes with dry, thorny, and bitter vegetation that other grazers refuse. When water is available it drinks great quantities at once to carry it through long dry spells.
Gestation lasts about 13 months, producing a single calf (occasionally twins). The calf nurses for roughly a year and a half, and young reach sexual maturity at three to five years.
The domestic form has served people for millennia, providing wool, milk, and transport across harsh terrain. Genetic studies show domestic and wild camels (Camelus ferus) split around 1.1 million years ago as separate lineages; that wild relative survives only as a tiny, severely threatened population.
