The issue of the chinkara interested me, so I went first to Turner's dictionary. Varāhamihira in his Bṛhatsaṃhitā mentions a chikkara in 85.20b, 38b, and 44a in the context of omens. The 1946 translation of Subrahmanya Sastri and Ramakrishna Bhat makes a mess of the situation by translating the first "musk rat (or civet cat)," the second as "a kind of deer" (but reading a chimaeric dhikkara) and the third as "jackal?." But Pañjābī cakāra and Hindī chikārā (whence the English term) make very likely that we are dealing here with the same animal. MW does give for chikkara "a kind of animal" and for chikkāra "a kind of antelope," both entries literally translated from the big St. Petersburg lexicon of Böhtlingk and Roth. Burrow ("Dravidian Studies VII," BSOAS 12 (1948), p. 379, §145) suggests a Dravidian origin for the Sanskrit word on the basis of Kannada cigari.
Nevertheless, although chikkara/chikkāra may have at some point become the scientific Sanskrit term for the species Gazella Bennettii, I feel that for general purposes the ubiquitous Sanskrit mṛga may have been broad enough to encompass all the infra-order Pecora (deer, antelopes, giraffes, and whatnot). Perhaps our seeing mṛga as "deer" rather than as "antelope" is best seen as the inheritance of a restrictive choice on the part of Victorian translators? (as the mostly wrong "swan" for haṃsa, etc.). Common usage Sanskrit seems to me rather sloppy in some departments of animal taxonomy, with pataṃga being almost any flying insect except for the hyper-fetishized bees (butterflies, moths, and even locusts) etc.
In a passage of the Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya dealt with by Schopen (Buddhist Monks, 232), instructions are given on the dharmacakrapravartana symbol to be engraved on the monastery's seals ("in the middle draw the wheel, and on both sides [draw] *mṛgas: on top the name of the owner of the monastery should be drawn," dbus su 'khor lo bris la glo gnyis su ri dgas 'og tu gtsug lag khang gi bdag po'i ming bri bar bya'o, Derge, 'Dul ba, Tha 8a6-7). The word given in the Tibetan is ri dags ("mountain beast") which is the standard translation of mṛga. I sense that had the ancient translators seen anything unusual like chikkara they would not have used the generic term.
I hope this is of any use!
namaskaromi,
Diego Loukota