Comparing Cats: A Discussion of Similarities & Differences

[GuateGojira]

(03-18-2022, 12:00 AM)dominusforti Wrote: I didn't say the sample wasn't biased, I said the results weren't caused by a sampling error. The sample is obviously biased, the paper ackowledges that. However the paper also notes that it is UNLIKELY, not impossible but certainly implausible, that the RESULTS were caused by that bias. This is because the study includes males and females of other taxa and notes that sexual dimorphism doesn't produce differences great enough to account for the separation lions have from all the other felids. Lions are identifiable, male or female, from all the other felids studied, enough so so that an anonymous felid clavicle can be determined as that of a lion merely based on the fact that the leonine claviculae are diagnostic enough to do so.

I understand and I am agree in that, because that is the real focus of the study. However the problem is that @SpinoRex is using the study to do something completelly diferent, which is to justify that the size of the clavicle is related with strength, which is something that the document do not mean to do. As @"Khan85" explained, the document focus in other thing, not in show that a larger clavicle provide more force or anything like that. In fact, the main focus of the study is to separate the clavicles from Panthera atrox and those from Smilodon fatalis.

Now, even when sexual dimorphism is probably not the answer, subspecies origin probably is, and that is something that the study did not focused. After all, the bones of an 98 kg Malayan tigress are significantly smaller than those of a 135 kg Indian tigress. But we know than that was not the point of the study, this is just to invalidate the specific claim of SpinoRex. Reply