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

[GuateGojira]

Thank you very much @peter, this is very valuable information for our databases but also for my comparative images.

There is a lot to digest now, but for the moment I would like to confirm that in fact, the largest Indochinese tiger skulls reported in literature came from Malaysia.

Tigers in this area are not the dwarfs that most people believe, in fact, the largest specimens are as large as average sized Bengal-Amur tigers. The few available weights (reported by Khan, as far I remember) came from females and immature males (this based in the fact that on average, the recorded females are larger and heavier than the males (sic!)), and the only two weights reported by Dr Kawanishi (110 and 130 kg) are estimations, not real weights. He believes that Malayan tigers are of the same size than Sumatran ones, and this has been copy-paste in most of the internet, but the true is that only one true weight is available (120 kg) as is not from a large specimen. On the other hand, the largest wild caught male in modern records was of the same size than the largest male hunted in the old days, measured between pegs (over 290 cm). This shows that although Malayan tigers are smaller on average, the do reach relative large sizes and this is also supported by the large skulls recorded in the area (over 360 mm, just like the largest Caspian tigers!!! ). Reply