The Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea and Panthera fossilis)

[tigerluver]

Canines and dentition as a whole vary a lot in their proportion with the skull, so direct scaling is usually inaccurate. 

I agree that Amur tiger may have taken up the larger cat niche once the cave lion went extinct. Perhaps the Ngandong tiger is evidence of that. As the tiger moved south, escaping the cave lion lineage, it found the space to get huge rapidly. 

I may be wrong, but the tiger seems to be one of most flexible cats in terms of size. Just look at the modern subspecies and the prehistoric chronospecies. The other cats have intraspecific size variation but usually the max of the smallest subspecies is not a third of the largest, unlike tigers. I feel the size discrepancy and genetic predisposition to shrinking when pressures apply saved the tiger while the cave lion and other megafauna cats could not maintain their massive sizes during the extinction periods that finally ended the iconic species. Reply