Notch Coalition Male Lineage

[Pckts]

(04-21-2015, 11:23 PM)'Amnon242' Wrote:

(04-21-2015, 10:27 PM)'Pckts' Wrote: Same, tbh I see no reason why either cat would be larger today compared to years past.
If looking at it from a realistic stand point, all factors that would allow cats to be larger are not in their advantage. Prey availability, space, genetic variances allowed by open corridors and large gene pools.
We have almost nothing to go off of for verified tiger and lion weights available to the public in modern days. We go off of images and eye witness accounts, so until we could have access to 100s of verified weights from past till present I don't see any chance of proving the theory of cats being larger or smaller than years past. And even the weights we use from years past are usually from hunters who's equipment or methods are all slightly different in some way, usually.


 

But modern progressive generation of lions have learned to tackle big prey like eland, buffalo and hippo. Their ancestors didnt know how to hunt them.

 

 

I highly doubt that, there is nothing that would point to that. There are predation on large prey and predators dating back for as long as humans have recorded it.
Heck, there are claw marks and deaths attributed to Mammoth and Bison from " very large cats ". "Blue Babe" for one
https://books.google.com/books?id=csJlqn...ks&f=false


Even Schaller noticed this in the 60s and 70s. The access to wild life has just recently been allowed to the general public and video and photograph have just recently been mobilized and allowed us to shoot this up close and often.
What really dictates Lion predation is availability of prey, that's why most switch prey choices depending on what herds are migrating through their territory. The new climate change that's occurring may be a true deal changer.

And lets take a step further,
is there any scientific proof that hunting larger prey leads to larger lions? Lions need more members to hunt larger prey and that means food needs to be distributed to more mouths. We would have to look from location to location, note prey taken and time of the year they were weighed, then compare them from all over. Since lions generally show very little difference in weight from location to location, its most likely not going to have a large factor on size of the cat. Reply