Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[GuateGojira]

(05-26-2015, 10:40 AM)'tigerluver' Wrote: Anyhow, this may be of interest to some, this is a comparison of the skull of the Ngandong tiger (left) with that of a Sze-Chuan tiger (right) (presumably P.t. acutidens).

*This image is copyright of its original author

The Ngandong skull is 380 mm x 250 mm (vK has it down as 240 mm, proven to be an error by his own math and personal measurements). The Ngandong tiger skull seems very different with regard to the dentition proportions from the rest of tigers. Dentitions seem rather small, completely opposite of the modern Javan tiger.

I was left to find the length of the China skull myself. This is likely a female's, of greatest length 269 mm. The dentitions are proportionately larger than the other tiger subspecies. 

Based on these holotypes, the Wahnsien tiger is actually not very large and the seemingly small Ngandong tiger specimens are of respectable size when accounting for gender and the species exception robusticity not seen in the Wahnsien bones (bar metapodials). Of course, one specimen isn't necessarily representative of an entire species, but its the best we have. I will say this. As I continue examining fossil "tigers", the morphological differences may be strong enough to speciate, similar to the P. spelaea system. Of course, a lot of math is going into it to prove the speciation concept (e.g. ANOVA tests), and whenever all the code is written into R (somehow, the program isn't too user friendly), hopefully the manuscript will go through without being shredded too much.

 

Some time ago, I made my own estimation of the size of the Wanhsien tiger skull. I get to the conclusion that it was probably a female, no larger than modern South China tigers.

My estimation was of 326 cm in greatest length and 289 cm in condylobasal length. This was based in the fact that the mandible of this specimen was of 215 kg (Hooijer, 1947). Latter, based on this and using the equations of Christiansen & Harris (2009), Sorkin (2008) and Van Valkenburgh (1990), I get to a body mass of 157.9 kg for this particular specimen.

I most confess that I have not compared the pictures of the skull of the Ngandong tiger, in order to see if the zygomatic wide of 250 mm was correct or not. The first time that I made the original review of the Ngandong tiger in AVA, I believed that it was 250 mm, but latter Waveriders corrected me that it was 240 cm. Now that you say that it is 250 mm, I will like to see how do you get to that conclusion. I am going to make a comparison to see this too.

Other thing, the dentition of this particular Ngandong tiger skull is similar to that of modern Bengal tigers of similar size, in fact, using the equations of Christiansen & Harris (2009), Sorkin (2008) and Van Valkenburgh (1990), I get to a body mass of 255.8 kg, which seems more or less accurate for a specimen of that skulls size.
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