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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 - Polar - 01-19-2016
(01-19-2016, 07:32 AM)tigerluver Wrote: 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.
That dwarf lion skeleton actually looked to have a bear's skull, so yeah it definitely was a fake.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-19-2016
Also, Barbary lions were smaller in size than African/Asian ones, or similar?
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - GrizzlyClaws - 01-19-2016
(01-19-2016, 08:32 AM)Polar Wrote: Also, Barbary lions were smaller in size than African/Asian ones, or similar?
Prior to the human interference, they were about the same size.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-22-2016
tigerluver, my ISP provider suddenly called me to plan my router for a service change today (apparently to change/refresh its service from Comcast Premium to X-Finity till Saturday, then I'm all good), and I am typing this on my smartphone. The document is only stored on my computer, and I can't get it out in any way since I didn't use any Google Cloud services or a USB/CD device to store it. And you said you were busy after the 23rd, but I will provide the PDF document ASAP on Saturday since I've already finalized it. Sorry for the delay.
I've already uploaded the study on how older bears continually get stronger with age than younger bears on the "Bear Size" forum. (This document was on my Google Drive for years now, so I could upload it without my computer.)
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-22-2016
(01-17-2016, 04:35 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote:(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.
Didn't they have bigger and more numerous prey in Siberia at that time as well? I've always thought Siberian cave lions were larger than the cave lions in Europe due to that exact reason.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - GrizzlyClaws - 01-22-2016
@Polar, based on the scientifically recorded fossils, the Siberian Cave lions are smaller, but based on the private collection from China, they are bigger.
So it is quite baffling.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-24-2016
Both tigerluver and GrizzlyClaws, here they are: tales about lion-tamers and lions in the Himalayan valley. (I had to re-read the book quite a bit in order to find the page with the actual anecdotes, phew!)
I'll continue to take sections and quotes out of this book if I see any more valuable info, but for now, here's the file:
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-25-2016
Reading that excerpt, it seems the villagers were simply referring to captive lions, maybe who had escaped? Gir lion don't have black manes from memory.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - GrizzlyClaws - 01-25-2016
(01-25-2016, 03:57 AM)tigerluver Wrote: Reading that excerpt, it seems the villagers were simply referring to captive lions, maybe who had escaped? Gir lion don't have black manes from memory.
The Asiatic lions could grow with thick dark mane when living in the colder climate, since they are closely related to the Barbary lions.
Even the African lions can convergently develop this morphology.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-25-2016
There actually are wild and unmixed Asiatic lions with black manes, but their names are too small to notice for their size.
Yeah, I guess these lions are escaped captive specimens, they can't just suddenly adapt to the icy mountain climate that are the Himalayas, without the natives regularly noticing them.
In some pictures, I've seen modern Asiatic lions grow thick manes without exposure to cold weather, but I don't know if they are mixed with African lions. Asiatic/Barbary lions of the past had bigger belly hair and manes than all other lions.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 01-25-2016
I'm sure lions could survive in the lower Himalayas. They colonized three continents (two if we talk Eurasia). Only issues would be the forest, which seems to inhibit lion expansion, having enough breeding females, and dealing with a same sized, same niche tiger already established in the area.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 01-25-2016
(01-25-2016, 04:39 AM)tigerluver Wrote: I'm sure lions could survive in the lower Himalayas. They colonized three continents (two if we talk Eurasia). Only issues would be the forest, which seems to inhibit lion expansion, having enough breeding females, and dealing with a same sized, same niche tiger already established in the area.
True. They won't be able to establish territoriality in the land where the more powerful tiger, sloth bear, and black bear reside.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 02-04-2016
An earlier conversation with @Polar reminded me of cortical bone thickness, so here's the data from Meachen-Samuels and Van Valkenburgh (2010) reorganized into species. The sample sizes of modern felids were abysmal (with lions and tigers only having 2 representative for each bone), so the trends here may not be representative of what is true for each respective species. Cortical bone thickness also decreases with age, adding some error to the measurement as well. Kavg is the measure of cortical bone thickness, averaging both the lateromedial and anteroposterior cortical measurements into one to represent a whole bone. The smaller the Kavg, the more cortical bone the species has, thus theoretically more density at at least the shaft.
*This image is copyright of its original author
It seems that cortical bone thickness is not correlated with mass density. The jaguar, with the most weight per length of bone, as a high Kavg, indicating lesser cortical bone thickness. It seems that cortical bone thickness increases without regard to body size to mass density for other biophysical reasons. Plus, seeing the cheetah with a cortical bone thickness greater than the jaguar leaves a big question mark on the reliability of cortical bone thickness in determining built.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - Polar - 02-04-2016
Fast-twitch muscles increase cortical bone or overall bone thickness (depending on bone growth limitations), and slow-twitch Ib (brute strength) muscles increase cross-sectional bone filament density.
This is probably the reason why the cheetah has a greater cortical bone thickness than the jaguar does as far as the ratio between cortical bone thickness/ whole bone diameter goes.
I'll have to supply the study for this on Sunday as I have quite a trip to make for my IT Tech Certification ceremony, and I have extreme amounts of schoolwork to accomplish.
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 02-12-2016
*This image is copyright of its original author
From Merriam and Stock (1932) and Marciszak et al. (2014).
P. fossilis has a narrow occipital protuberance compared to the other two, similarly to the island tigers as compared to their mainland relatives. P. fossilis also looks to have more continuous triangular cranium. These two traits do not really vary intraspecifically and thus are notable interspecific discrepancies. In terms of shape, I find P. atrox and P. spelaea close to each other with P. fossilis a very unique form. Observations like this make it very difficult to figure out which species is closer to which.