relict

1. Ecology

a. a group of animals or plants that exists as a remnant of a formerly widely distributed group in an environment different from that in which it originated

b. (as modifier): a relict fauna

2. Geology

a. a mountain, lake, glacier, etc., that is a remnant of a pre-existing formation after a destructive process has occurred

b. a mineral that remains unaltered after metamorphism of the rock in which it occurs

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Relict

(rel -ikt) A Soviet space mission launched in 1983 that made the first measurement of dipole anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006

relict

[′rel·ikt]

(biology)

A persistent, isolated remnant of a once-abundant species.

(geology)

Referring to a topographic feature that remains after other parts of the feature have been removed or have disappeared.

Pertaining to a mineral, structure, or feature of a rock which represents features of an earlier rock and which persists in spite of processes tending to destroy it, such as metamorphism.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Relict

an animal or plant species that exists in a given country or region as a remnant of the flora and fauna of past geological ages and that in some way is anomalous with regard to present-day conditions of existence. Relicts are identified by their ties to the plant and animal world of past ages or to definite types of vegetation. Thus, species that have been preserved without visible changes at least since the Pliocene are called Tertiary or, more correctly, Neogenic relicts.

In Colchis there are a number of remnant tree species (wing nut, zelkova, chestnut) and evergreen shrubs. The ironwood is a relict in the Talysh Mountains, and the muskrat is a relict in the Volga and Ural basins. Forest relicts in the arctic are species that advanced far to the north during the warm interglacial age and stayed there surrounded by tundra (twinflower, whortleberry, certain wintergreens). Glacial relicts are plants and animals that have survived from the ice age on a given territory.

Plant and animal species that have been preserved only in certain sectors of formerly large ranges and in this sense resemble relicts are called pseudorelicts.

A. I. TOLMACHEV

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References in periodicals archive

Besides being incongruent with the regional vegetation, these grasslands have gained special attention because they have been declared or suggested to be either relicts or analogues of vegetation that existed in unglaciated Beringia during the last 2000 years of the Late Wisconsinan (e.g., Lausi and Nimis, 1985; Edwards and Armbruster, 1989; Yurtsev, 2001; Swanson, 2006; Berman et al., 2011; Conway and Danby, 2014).

Summer Climatic Moisture Balances for Yukon Xerophytic Grassland Slopes and Their Late-Wisconsinan Counterparts: Are Present-Day Grasslands Beringian Relicts?

Previous genetic studies in Relict gull used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and a nuclear gene to reveal structure and it was suggested that more effective molecular markers were needed to fully address the relationship among different subpopulations (Yang et al., 2015).

Short Communication - Microsatellite Loci Identified by Cross-Species Amplifications in the Globally Vulnerable Relict Gull, Larus relictus

Sequences below, particularly those indicative of relict plant material, suggest that the diminished sequence yield from the indigenous population is dampened by such signals and make detailed conclusions about an indigenous community more tenuous.

Marine Subsurface Microbial Community Shifts Across a Hydrothermal Gradient in Okinawa Trough Sediments

We hypothesize that the recent disjunct range is a relict of a wider glacial distribution.

Phylogeography of the Alpine shrew, Sorex alpinus (Soricidae, Mammalia)

Cluster A1a represents xerophilous, orotemperate submediterranean (orosub-mediterranean) hyperhumid relict Scots pine mesoforests from the middle oromediterranean belt of the Gredos range (~1600-1800 m asl).

Syntaxonomical update on the relict groves of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris var. iberica) and Spanish black pine (Pinus nigra subsp. salzmannii) in the Gredos range (central Spain)/Estudio sintaxonomico de los bosques relicticos de pino silvestre (Pinus sylvestris var. iberica) y pino negro (Pinus nigra subsp. salzmannii) en la sierra de Gredos (centro de Espana)

"By the 2020s, the gas cycling will have touched most of the relict and residual oil.

Adapting to a changing market

"A relict is like you, Uncle Ed, a remnant of an otherwise extinct organism," Keith says.

Moonglade

By contrast, our investigation of a sugarberry-cedar elm-pecan forest along the Bosque River emphasized the understory of the relict vegetation (Daubenmire, 1968) of this natural area (Helms, 1998) because these vegetational layers were of obvious value for grazing and browsing animals, constituting forest range or grazable woodland (Bedell, 1998).

Composition and structure of a mixed-hardwood bottomland forest in the West Cross Timbers of north-central Texas

The Boreal Owl as a Pleistocene relict in Colorado.

Historical specimens of boreal owls from Montana

The author deals with this relict landscape in the second part of the book.

Stefan Brauckmann, Eisenbahnkulturlandschaft. Erlebbarkeit und Potentiale [Cultural Landscape of Railways: Perceptibility and Potential]

THE doughty and many-talented Clarissa Dickson Wright, that large cook now the relict of BBC's Two Fat Ladies, has never struck me as a retiring woman.

Left terrified - by feisty cook

He now edits an on-line refereed journal, The Relict Hominoid Inquiry (www.isu.edu/rhi) examining the global phenomenon of relict “wildmen”.

The Falcon Project - the Most Penetrating Search for the Legendary Sasquatch Ever Undertaken