Ancient Jaguars

[Balam]

A lot is known about the ancient lions and tigers, but jaguars have a very intriguing fossil record as well. In here we are to post information and new discoveries regarding ancient jaguar species and subspecies.

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Panthera onca mesembrina, Pleistocene of South America

Skull:

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The size of P. o. mesembrina:

"Body Mass estimation. The size of the m1 in the felid is the classic best gauge of body mass (Legendre and Roth, 1988, VanValkenburgh, 1990). We calculated the body mass (BM) of F. o. mesembrina using the m1 measurements, following the proposal of VanValkenburgh (1990) with the formula:

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We determinated a body mass of 231.21 kg for “Panthera onca mesembrina”. This value is well within of the range of the males of Panthera atrox (Wheeler and Jefferson, 2009), whereas the values are much smaller in Panthera onca (Christiansen and Harris, 2005, Prevosti and Vizcaíno, 2006). Further, this body mass is within the range of largest felids, such as Smilodon fatalis and S. populator (Christiansen and Harris, 2005).

Recently, Prevosti and Martin (2014) made a mass calculation of “P. onca mesembrina” based on some unpublished fossil remains. They obtained values between 190 kg to 243 kg, based on the length of m1 of different individuals (see Prevosti and Martin, 2014: Supplementary data 1). It is worth mentioning that the living P. onca shows values near 100 kg (102 kg sensu Sunquist and Sunquist, 2002), and exceptionally upper values of 158 kg (Seymour, 1989). Further, the large extinct North American jaguar P. onca augusta, was 15 to 20% larger than living jaguar, being less than 190 kg (Seymour, 1989).

In this way, the mass calculation for “P. o. mesembrina” obtained by Prevosti and Martin (2014) and present paper points that the Patagonian Panthera was a felid that duplicates the size of living or extinct jaguars.

Additionally, based on body mass determination, it is possible to calculate the focused prey size of “P. o. mesembrina” on the basis of the following formula (Hemmer, 2004):

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Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar...8317301094

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Reconstruction by Roman Uchytel Reply