ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[GuateGojira]

Tigerluver, the problem here is that your analysis of the Wanhsien tiger is based in a single large mandible, and we most face the fact that we don't know its origin or if is actually a tiger. Deformation for fossilization is also a good explanation, like the skull A.M.N.H. 18624.

About the time, 200,000 years is enough time for such a change and even more, look that less than 100 years were needed to change from an average Central Indian tiger to a dwarf Sundarbans population, and about 50 years and a great extermination caused a greatly reduced body mass in the modern Amur tigers. Imagine a small population of survival tigers after the great destruction of the Toba eruption, trying to survive with the few animals still alive, they probably changed its morphology (talking of robustness and metapodials) in order to adapt to this new habitat. So yes, 200,000 is enough time from my point of view, check that with less than 70,000 years the Amur and Javanese tigers are completely different, even when the overall population was still interconnected at about 20,000 years ago, according with Kitchener and Dugmore (2000).

About the Ngandong tiger, it is possible that there could be a large population, but check the fact that the skull have more characteristics from the Sunda and not from mainland, suggesting that this population was from the island, not from the continent itself.

I will like to see the document of Xie et al. (2015), could you put it here please?
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