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

[GrizzlyClaws]

@peter 

According to @tigerluver , tiger got relatively smaller pm4 in relation to its skull. And the largest tiger skull he personally measured was 380 mm with a pm4 of 34 mm. So he personally believes the average skull size for those Chinese Pleistocene tigers should be around 400 mm, maybe with some exceptional specimens exceeding 460 mm.

The mesio-distal width of the canine crown is also staggering with 3.2 cm, perhaps around 5 cm at the mesio-distal width of the canine root?

The modern Kruger lion only got 3.1 cm maximum at the mesio-distal width of the canine root which means the canine root of a large male African lion is even thinner than the canine crown of the Pleistocene tigers.

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

Morphologically speaking, the Manchurian Amur tiger is the closest type of modern tigers to the Pleistocene because they both inhabited in the temperate woodland to the relatively cold taiga forest. Meanwhile other tiger subspecies have been morphologically shifted because choosing different habitation compared to its Pleistocene predecessor.

Genetically speaking, other tiger subspecies are just as closely related to the Pleistocene tiger as the Amur tiger. Reply