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Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

Guatemala GuateGojira Offline
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(09-10-2018, 09:03 PM)Smilodon-Rex Wrote: To be honest, Ngandong tiger may not as huge as we image, the largest felines in history were prehistoric lions and giant machairodontinaes .

The Ngandong tiger (Panthera tigris soloensis) is know for just a few bones and still this bones are larger than many of the bones of the cave "lions" spelaea/fossilis/atrox. On the other side, the cave "lions" are known for many more fossils, and we have a good idea about its sizes. My point is that in fossil records you need many fossils to get a good idea of the avearage and maximum sizes and to found a "big" specimen is very rare, is something that we can achieve only if you found many fossils. In the case of the cave "lions" spelaea/fossilis/atrox we know this, but in the case of the tiger is different.

We have few bones of the Ngandong tiger and the probability says that those bones are from "average" specimens, not from the largest. This means that the huge tiger with the femur of 480 mm, which is larger than in any recorded felid, was probably an "average" specimen and this suggest that larger tiger may exist, but we need to search it. A similar case is that of the Spinosaurus, which we have very few fossils but until resently Paleontologist found the larger specimens.

So, in theory, the largest Pleistocene tigers were probably of the same size than the largest Pleistocene "lions", but we need more fossils. I don't think that Machairodontids were as big, in fact they fossils are more slender and even the skull is much narrow than modern Pantherines. Those weights estimated of over 400 kg for M. kabir and M. horribilis and made with the formulas of Anyonge (1993) which produce gross overestimations and Van Valkenburg (1990) which also produce overestimations as her formula based in Condylobasal length depends more of the length of the skull and ignore its robusticity.
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Messages In This Thread
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - GuateGojira - 09-10-2018, 09:56 PM
Sabertoothed Cats - brotherbear - 06-11-2016, 11:59 AM
RE: Sabertoothed Cats - peter - 06-11-2016, 04:28 PM
Ancient Jaguar - brotherbear - 01-04-2018, 12:45 AM



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