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Pleistocene Big Cats
The Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea and Panthera fossilis)
The Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea and Panthera fossilis)
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The Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea and Panthera fossilis)
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Gigantic lion, Panthera leo, from the Pleistocene of Natodomeri, eastern Africa
This is the paper which we referenced a while back.  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author I attempted a crude overlay over a barbary lion skull.  *This image is copyright of its original author
@tigerluver,
From post #79, is it actually possible for scientists to clone from solidified, partially deformed flesh of animals that were frozen? I remember reading about some in Russia who dug a preserved mammoth (and an actual rhino and steppe bison) and were attempting to clone it, but no responses about their progress so far...
@Polar , last I checked, the frozen DNA is still not 100% complete usually (I'd expect the same for this cub). So the closest thing to cloning to full animal we have now is inserting the genes into the closest relative and coming out with a hybrid. If I remember correctly, mammoth cloning has been proposed under this basis, where we won't have a true mammoth but something between a modern elephant and a mammoth.
So in order to possibly clone something similar to the Cave Lion, and we know that the Cave Lion is more related to extant lions (from both continents), we can extract Cave Lion DNA and put it within a modern lion's embryo and see it grow? That sounds pretty interesting, although since the Cave Lion is extinct, we wouldn't know what exact effects intermixing between the two would have, similar to the interbreeding between a lion and tiger which reduces fertility and encourages ridiculous sizes. So the "clone" could not even resemble a perfect mix between the two.
@tigerluver
What is your own interpretation about the size of the giant Pleistocene African lions? BTW, it seems they were morphologically closer to the northern branch of Panthera leo, maybe the northern branch has simply preserved more archaic traits compared to the southern branch. (11-14-2017, 11:29 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote: @tigerluver African lions were bigger back then? Didn't know that. I know for sure that ancient Asian lions were bigger before. The northern branch of lions had particularly larger manes than southern counterparts, but I don't know if the Barbary/Asian lions are significantly (or were) ever bigger than the African lions on average. Northern lions also tend to have a slightly more rounded skull and smoother mandibular edges (much like tigers) compared to mainland African lions, and some of these Pleistocene African lions had those same features. Is there a thread which goes further into the other differences between Barbary and Sub-Saharan lions? (11-14-2017, 11:48 AM)Polar Wrote:(11-14-2017, 11:29 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote: @tigerluver Although the authors didn’t directly conclude its relationship with the modern lions, but it is quite likely this population could be considered ancestral to the modern lions. Since the timeline looks quite consistent with the emergence and divergence of the modern lion populations. Probably the northern branch of the modern lions had inherited more distinct traits of their ancestors.
@GrizzlyClaws , with an estimated basal length of 380 mm (from the text, the scale on the image seems to be quite off), this would be a very large cat. The box and whisker plot sums up this lion's position well as compared even if all the giants we know of on record were not used. CBL is usually 20-30 mm more than basal length thus the CBL of this skull would be around 405 mm. The GSL would be around 450 mm. That's a smidge less than that largest skulls of P. atrox most are aware of (458 mm) and a bit smaller than the giant Mokhnevskaya P. fossilis skull (475 mm) and University of California giant P. atrox skull (467.5 mm).
If we say a 200 kg lion with skull of CBL of 340 mm, by isometry this lion would have weighed 340 kg. I've inflated the skull size to weight ratio of the isometric comparison as these lions were probably more robust than their modern counterparts, thus a smaller CBL base should be attached the the 200 kg weight. This skull goes back to the point that the lion's huge size is African in origin, not Eurasian. We have the giant P. shawi from south Africa that I've mentioned earlier and in the main posts. This Natodomeri specimen shows that the giant size potential was still there a million years later. Probability also hints that if a single skull found such a big specimen, there must've been larger specimens. Maybe this wasn't the case, but we have some reason to believe the African lions of the late Pleistocene outsize the cave lions up north. As always, more specimens will give us a better look. Either this weekend or the upcoming thanksgiving, I'll try to get some ratios on this skull and see which species it sits most closely with. (11-15-2017, 09:33 PM)tigerluver Wrote: @GrizzlyClaws , with an estimated basal length of 380 mm (from the text, the scale on the image seems to be quite off), this would be a very large cat. The box and whisker plot sums up this lion's position well as compared even if all the giants we know of on record were not used. CBL is usually 20-30 mm more than basal length thus the CBL of this skull would be around 405 mm. The GSL would be around 450 mm. That's a smidge less than that largest skulls of P. atrox most are aware of (458 mm) and a bit smaller than the giant Mokhnevskaya P. fossilis skull (475 mm) and University of California giant P. atrox skull (467.5 mm). Did the African Lions of the Pleistocene also lack manes or were they fully evolved by then (with the mane)?
@tigerluver
This summarizes perfectly, and ironically, Africa as the ultimate homeland for all lion stem groups, yet the lion fossil records over there was by far less studied compared to those from Eurasia and America. BTW, I guess the 475 mm giant skull of Mokhnevskaya Cave was eventually classified as a late form of Panthera fossilis. Thus, this makes the largest Panthera spelaea skull 451 mm, and the only available skull of the Pleistocene African lions now match the largest recorded skull of Panthera spelaea, yet fall short against the largest recorded skulls for Panthera fossilis and Panthera atrox, but we might expect those even larger specimens to be discovered in a foreseeable future. Quote:Thus, apart from the mandible from Kuznetsk Basin, distribution of lions with features resembling P. fossilis in the Pleistocene of Asia is confirmed by the presence of P. youngi in ZKD-1 and the findings of very large forms in the Kurtak archeological area and in the Mid-dle Ural Mountains (Mokhnevskaya Cave).
@Polar , no one really knows for sure when the African lion got its mane. The best way to do that would be to figure out what gene is responsible for the mane then see how old that mutation is. I've not yet to see any paper on that as that is quite a difficult and possibly expensive feat. This is also the first time an African lion fossil how show'd something very large. While P. shawi has been there, most scientists don't know of its existence and if they do, most never paid attention to its size as it's just a fragment of a humerus.
(11-16-2017, 05:02 AM)tigerluver Wrote: @Polar , no one really knows for sure when the African lion got its mane. The best way to do that would be to figure out what gene is responsible for the mane then see how old that mutation is. I've not yet to see any paper on that as that is quite a difficult and possibly expensive feat. This is also the first time an African lion fossil how show'd something very large. While P. shawi has been there, most scientists don't know of its existence and if they do, most never paid attention to its size as it's just a fragment of a humerus. Since both southern/northern branch share the same mutation, so this mutation definitely happened prior the divergence of the southern/northern branch which occurred around 110 kya. Now the giant prehistoric African lion fossils dated back to 196 kya, so the question about the mane status for the prehistoric African lions has definitely become an intriguing one. So it could be either contemporary to the giant African lions or occurred right after the size recession of the population. |
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