The steppe Marmot or Bobac, which today we meet spread from Belarus and Ukraine to central Kazakhstan, lived in the not very distant past and in the plains of the Roman countries.
Romanian paleontologist I. Z. Barbu reported in 1930 fossil remains of bobac in Botosani and Cluj. Its name bobac or baibac is a Turkish-Tatar loanword. The bobac or the steppe marmot is the close relative of the alpine marmot, as evidenced by the millennial observation of the Romanian Peasant, attentive connoisseur of every veituitor.
The toponymy has preserved in turn a series of evidence of the presence of this animal in the fauna of Romania, evidence materialized by names of villages such as Tarina Baibaci, Baibaci, Baibaraci, Bibaraceasca, La Baibaci, Gura Baibaciului etc.
The presence of bobac or baibac in different areas of the country is indirectly evidenced by onomastics and folklore. In Teleorman, Calarasi, Giurgiu, Braila, Ialomita and Ilfov, the nickname e baibac was given to a small man, fat and plump like a marmot. Especially prized were the bobac furs from which were made in ancient times clothes for women and children, called baibarace.
In Wallachia, that garment was called baibafir, and it was a precious gift among the wedding gifts of brides of Boyar beef. Due to its highly prized coat, bobac disappears from Moldavia around 1761, in Baragan and Dobrogea surviving until the threshold of 1800.
Like other rodent species, field marmots are susceptible to the transmission of bubonic plague. A population of beavers in the Urals is responsible for the spread of the plague wave that ravaged Russia in the late nineteenth century.
