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The Peninsular Bighorn Sheep find home among the low-elevation desert rocky slopes, canyons and washes of the Peninsular ranges of southern California, USA and range into Baja California, Mexico. Survivors that excel at living in this arid land, their ancestors made the journey from Siberia across the Bering land bridge, about a million years ago. By the turn of the 20th century, 2 million bighorns roamed the region. Less than 70,000 remain. Peninsular bighorns, numbering only in the hundreds, are an isolated sub-population that is rapidly declining due to habitat loss, fragmentation, poaching, and disease. The US Fish and Wildlife Service gave them endangered status in 1998.
