Comparing Cats: A Discussion of Similarities & Differences

[tigerluver]

Good reads @Pckts. I'll go through them thoroughly when I get the chance.

Bite force quotient type methods will be needed for size corrected comparisons as everyone already gets.

From Bite club: comparative bite force in big biting mammals and the prediction of predatory behaviour in fossil taxa (from now I'm going to give paper names instead of just the in text citations to help folks locate the works easier) has the BFQs as follows:
Jaguar: 142 (unadjusted), 137 (allometry adjusted)
Leopard: 100 (unadjusted), 94 (allometry adjusted)
Tiger: 140 (unadjusted), 127 (allometry adjusted)
Cougar: 118 (unadjusted), 108 (allometry adjusted)
Lion: 118 (unadjusted), 112 (allometry adjusted)
Cheetah: 110 (adjusted), 119 (allometry adjusted)

To find a correlation with skull characteristics, here are the zygomatic width/basal length ratios of the cats (the greater the number the proportionately wider the skull):
Jaguar: 0.837
Leopard: 0.723
Tiger: 0.788
Cougar: 0.77
Lion: 0.743
Cheetah: 0.772

So a positive correlation of greater skull width and and BFQ, although at least for this data set the relationship is not a perfectly straight line, but rather there are few bumps on the way. n=1 for each species is not statistically helpful either. 

One thing the skull width - BFQ brings to my mind is that prehistoric cats probably had some weaker bites with their longer skulls. Probably a remnant of the weasel-like ancestor rather than an evolutionary change (i.e. the cave lion lineage went from longer to broad). Reply