Eurasian Beaver

About the Eurasian Beaver

The Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) or European beaver is a species of beaver widespread across Eurasia, with a rapidly increasing population of 1.5 million in 2020. The Eurasian beaver was hunted to near-extinction for both its fur and castoreum, with only about 1,200 beavers in eight relict populations from France to Mongolia in the early 20th century. It has since been reintroduced into much of its former range and now lives from Western, Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Russia through China and Mongolia, with about half the population in Russia. It is listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List.

Castor fiber was the scientific name used by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, who described the beaver in his work Systema Naturae. Between 1792 and 1997, several Eurasian beaver zoological specimens were described and proposed as subspecies, including:

C. f. albus and C. f. solitarius by Robert Kerr in 1792 C. f. fulvus and C. f. variegatus by Johann Matthäus Bechstein in 1801 C. f. galliae by Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1803 C. f. flavus, C. f. varius and C. f. niger by Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest in 1822

C. f. gallicus Johann Baptist Fischer in 1829 C. f. proprius... Wikipedia →