Bear and its sibling chase a mountain goat off a cliff and across the highway

The mountain goat (Oreamnos americanus), otherwise called the Rocky Mountain goat, is a hoofed vertebrate endemic to North America. A subalpine to snow capped species, it is a certain footed climber regularly seen on precipices and ice.

Regardless of its vernacular name, it's anything but an individual from Capra, the class that incorporates any remaining goats, like the wild goat, Capra aegagrus, from which the homegrown goat is determined.

The mountain goat is an even-toed ungulate of the request Artiodactyla and the family Bovidae that incorporates elands, gazelles, and cows. It has a place with the subfamily Caprinae, alongside obvious goats, wild sheep, the chamois, the muskox and different species. The takins of the Himalayan district, while not a sister ancestry of the mountain goat, are in any case firmly related and practically contemporary to the mountain goat; they developed in equal from a hereditary goat. Different individuals from this gathering are the Pseudois "blue sheep", the genuine goats, and the Himalayan tahr. The sheep ancestry is likewise firmly related, while the muskox genealogy is fairly more inaccessible. The mountain goats presumably separated from their family members in the late Tortonian, some 7.5 to 8 million years prior.

Given that all major caprine genealogies arose in the Late Miocene and contain at any rate one yet normally a few animal categories from the eastern Himalayan district, their most probable spot of beginning is between the present Tibet and Mongolia or close by. The mountain goat's precursors in this way most likely crossed the Bering Strait after they split from their family members, probably before the Wisconsinian glaciation. No Pliocene mountain goats have been recognized at this point; the realized fossil record is genuinely later, altogether from North America, and scarcely contrasts from the living creatures. In the Pleistocene, the little ancient mountain goat Oreamnos harringtoni lived in the southern Rocky Mountains. Antiquated DNA examines recommend that this was the sister types of the living mountain goat, not its predecessor; therefore, the living species would likewise trace all the way back to the Pleistocene in any event.

The mountain goat is the lone living species in the sort Oreamnos. The name Oreamnos is gotten from the Greek expression oros (stem metal ) "mountain" (or, on the other hand, oreas "mountain sprite") and the word amnos "sheep".