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+---- Thread: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines (/topic-freak-felids-a-discussion-of-history-s-largest-felines)
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-14-2016
A Second Case for the Odd Robusticity of P. t. soloensis
I've previously given my own measurements of the bones to show the species great robustness. However, I feel that discussing vK's own published measurements to support the assertion.
Starting with both humeri.
vK provided essentially the complete distal width of each bones. The 381 mm had a distal width of 102 mm and the 353 mm bone a distal width of 99 mm. The length/width ratios, whereby the smaller the number the more robust the specimen, 3.735 and 3.565, respectively. For comparison, Peigne et al. (2005) published a ratio in modern tigers of 3.77. The 381 mm humerus is not too exceptional, but the 353 mm is ~6% more robust than your modern tiger, which is significant. As Wheeler and Jefferson (2009) proposed, perhaps the thinner specimen is younger.
In regard to the femur, vK published the intercondylar notch diameter (IND) of 23 mm, citing how exceptional it was. From Christiansen and Harris (2005), IND can be roughly derived from IND = AW - LC(lm) - MC(lm) for the majority of bones, a few times produces a value a bit greater than the method of vK. Pictorially:
*This image is copyright of its original author
The three P. t. altaica males averaging 224 kg and 16.9 cm in IND. The Ngandong femur IND is 1.36x wider than these modern specimens, isometrically making the specimen 2.52x their average. Somewhat too much in my opinion, as most studies across species have found a bit negative allometry in long bone width dimension to mass relationships. Nonetheless, even without my personal measurements, vK's own data shows how robust the Ngandong tiger was, similarly to its potential prey item in Stegodon trigonocephalus, showing us a trend in the fauna of Sunda around 400 kya.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Fieryeel - 01-15-2016
I am sorry guys, my tooth isn't an Ngandong Tiger after all. It's a croc crown stuck on a fake root. I only just came to the verdict.
Over and over again, experts have said mine would definitely be ID-ed as a croc, if not for the strange root. I did a search based on what you guys suggested before, and I found this > http://imgur.com/a/hhWcC
That's 11 teeth right there, of which 2 are mine. All 11 have full roots. Fossilized teeth with full roots are rare as it is. I expected to see some with broken or partial roots, but no, I am seeing 11 out of 11 with nice, full roots - an impossibility.
As it turns out, both sellers who sold me my two didn't excavate the teeth; they are resellers. I also found out from a paleontologist that Java has been faking fossils for decades.
The Javanese really love tiger it seems. Every instance of these teeth have been sold as tiger, even those that are obviously croc in nature.
I did a final test: I applied force to my smaller tooth. It broke. Here's what it looks like on the inside > http://imgur.com/a/4F8iJ
Here's an album of Java croc teeth > http://imgur.com/a/gAhdB which you can compare against the crown of mine > http://imgur.com/a/KjnuC
And our search for an authentic Ngandong Tiger canine continues!
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-16-2016
You took a good risk breaking it open. The inside of tooth removes the possibility of a Sunda felid. Those teeth have a much more firm and solid cross section despite the age (as in the mandible a few posts above). We should've also focused on the texture and color of the specimen, which was different from other prehistoric felid canines we have discussed on here.
What happened to you happened to Christiansen and Mazak regarding a new "cheetah" from China a few years back. A whole paper was published on it, and in the end, it was fake. It's unfortunately very hard to trust fossils moved from person to person. Nevertheless, it's always so exciting when something new pops up and we, especially myself, am eager to make that leap in identifying it.
I'll go back and reread vK 1933, he wrote on the some features of the fossilized tiger bones and be back.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-16-2016
*This image is copyright of its original author
I remember the 470 mm P. spelaea bone was passed off as P. fossilis due to size and someone quoted Mladec as middle Pleistocene. Rereading the document, the specimen is likely much younger, as it is from the same collection of bison bones dated to around 20 kya. The Mokhnevskaya skull is likely from the latest interglacial, somewhere around 100 kya. This specimen may be even younger. It seems the great size of P. spelaea was retained up until its extinction.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - brotherbear - 01-16-2016
The Pseudo-Cat: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/dakota-badlands-used-host-wild-sabertoothed-pseudo-cat-battles-180957841/?no-ist
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - GrizzlyClaws - 01-17-2016
(01-16-2016, 09:26 AM)tigerluver Wrote:
*This image is copyright of its original author
I remember the 470 mm P. spelaea bone was passed off as P. fossilis due to size and someone quoted Mladec as middle Pleistocene. Rereading the document, the specimen is likely much younger, as it is from the same collection of bison bones dated to around 20 kya. The Mokhnevskaya skull is likely from the latest interglacial, somewhere around 100 kya. This specimen may be even younger. It seems the great size of P. spelaea was retained up until its extinction.
The Asian Cave lions could also likely have the same size as their European counterparts.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-17-2016
Either GrizzlyClaws or tigerluver, do any of you two know any existance of cave lions in East Asia, Himalayas, or South Asia?
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-17-2016
Kirillova et al. 2015 cited 60 kya old P. speleaa leaving at the furthest northeast edge of Russia this year. No one has explored the Himalayan fossil fauna too much. South(east) and at least the lower half of China have been solely controlled by the tiger as the resident large Panthera.
I don't think I've read an official record of Manchurian P. spelaea. There possibly existed a P. youngi, which some say is synonymous with the cave lion (Harington), others say it is simply a tiger (Hooijer), or its own species. All parties are working with scant remains and no DNA testing has been done on these P. youngi specimens. Morphology of the skull is prone to rapid convergent evolution and in my opinion can cause false relationships between species, as happened in Christiansen and Harris (2009) on their postulated link between P. onca and P. atrox.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-17-2016
(01-17-2016, 09:02 AM)tigerluver Wrote: Kirillova et al. 2015 cited 60 kya old P. speleaa leaving at the furthest northeast edge of Russia this year. No one has explored the Himalayan fossil fauna too much. South(east) and at least the lower half of China have been solely controlled by the tiger as the resident large Panthera.
I don't think I've read an official record of Manchurian P. spelaea. There possibly existed a P. youngi, which some say is synonymous with the cave lion (Harington), others say it is simply a tiger (Hooijer), or its own species. All parties are working with scant remains and no DNA testing has been done on these P. youngi specimens. Morphology of the skull is prone to rapid convergent evolution and in my opinion can cause false relationships between species, as happened in Christiansen and Harris (2009) on their postulated link between P. onca and P. atrox.
The reason why I asked about the possible Himalayan occupation of cave lions was because there are old Nepali tales of large lions living in the snowy regions of the range without much developed manes.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-17-2016
@Polar, interesting, could you direct us to some of those stories?
I find it very unlikely for the cave lion to reach it to the Himalayas. Even in Asia, they have only been proven to exist very far north.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-17-2016
(01-17-2016, 09:51 AM)tigerluver Wrote: @Polar, interesting, could you direct us to some of those stories?
I find it very unlikely for the cave lion to reach it to the Himalayas. Even in Asia, they have only been proven to exist very far north.
It will take me quite a long time to do so, probably a five-day research between my job and school (I read the tales approx. 3 years ago, and I do not know if they are still available on Google Books. If I can find the text, I will save the parts of it I want to relate to you on a PDF file.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-17-2016
No worries, @Polar. My gut tells me that the ideas of lion and tiger were lost in translation. Those areas refer to lion and tiger as "sher," and don't really discriminate the two. So maneless "sher" would refer to tiger.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-19-2016
Hi there again, tigerluver. Someone said to me the other day that European lions around the Mediterranean area (before the Greeks/Romans killed them) were not part of the P.leo spelaea sub-clade of lions, and that instead they migrated from Africa. He also stated that their size (the European lion of Roman times) was much smaller than that of African and Asian lions at that time (I think this was a poster by the name of "LionClaws" back on Carnivora Forums). Is this true? Was there a subsequent migration of lions into Europe after the P.leo spelaea died out, or were those Mediterranean lions actually remnants of the prehistoric Cave lion lineage?
And, btw, I just got the book about the lions in nepal (after a literal two-day search on Google Books and some other sites). It's actually by an Hindu writer known as Mugdha R. Sandesh, and the book is called "From the Hills of Nepal and Kush," now I just have to prepare/select which texts from the book I want to relate to you on a PDF most likely by Thursday of this week. Sounds good?
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-19-2016
Correct, the lions contemporary with modern civilization (<10 kya) is P. leo. P. spelaea went extinct around 10 kya, but it also occupied essentially all of Europe while it existed. So prehistoric humans would have had contact with the cave lion, but the Greeks and after the modern lion.
Three waves of lion are theorized to have come from an African stem group. The first wave, closer to a million years ago, was P. fossilis. The second wave was P. spelaea, whose exact date of emergence in Europe I don't remember, but was long enough after P. fossilis that according to a researcher P. spelaea and P. fossilis could not interbreed (Sabol 2011), and the two species seemed to have restricted each other's movement. I am not certain about P. fossilis extinction and P. spelaea emergence dates as it is debated as to whether the two are sister species or a single lineage. What is certain is that P. spelaea outlived P. fossilis by a long ways. P. leo likely migrated into Europe and Asia after P. spelaea died out, leaving the niche open around 10 kya. As a whole, the modern lion had to wait for the removal of P. spelaea as well as the emergence of a land bridge over to Eurasia.
I can't confirm the difference in size between European P. leo and African P. leo. Although, it'd seem more likely modern specimens are smaller, as that is the general trend across the majority of species. There was an April fools joke played a while back that proposed "dwarf" lions, but it was a bluff.
Sounds good, though I'll be very busy until after the 23rd.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - GrizzlyClaws - 01-19-2016
The European lion was a local population of the West African lion, just like the Barbary lion and the Asiatic lion.
There are only two subspecies for Panthera leo so far; one found across Eurasia and North/West/Central Africa, and the other one in Sub-Saharan Africa.