Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

I've prepared something more on Smilodon with bears as comparison, will post that ASAP.

Also, here's a surprise, the true 480 mm Ngandong femur. No distortions or anything, just what von Koenigswald photographed and published in his book (yes, unfortunately the page had to be ripped out for a perfect scan).

*This image is copyright of its original author

Edit: Here are the details on this femur.

To find the measurements, I myself used a pixel to pixel method on a high resolution scan of the page. For sharing purposes, I added a ruler for people to see. Unfortunately, it seems the photo quality degraded uploading a bit.

At first, the discrepancy in the distal measurement here and the one published worried me a bit. So I explored the possibility of a typo. I did the math and concluded a typo wasn't possible. If the distal extremity were 88 mm on this bone, then the proximal greatest diameter would be 91.6 mm, and the total length 393.4 mm. 2 typos in one has a 0% chance. Add to that, this is one of the two pages in the book which doesn't utilize an actual size scale. Upon further research, the measurement is from below, literally on the transverse plane.

Compared to modern comparative data, specifically the database of Christiansen, two values here are comparable, the length and the distal AW. The epicondylar index of this specimen is .223, out of the range of logged Amur and Bengal forms by a good amount (.183-.199). The database of Javan and Sumatran specimens comes closer to this value (.193-.212). I rescind my previous conclusions after getting my hands on wild, island form long bone data, and it seems larger epicondylar indices do correlate a bit with relative body density. Reply