Wanhsien tiger ~

[tigerluver]

@genao87, for one, we now have two Pleistocene "Amur" tiger populations on record

I'll start with the new late Pleistocene records which date to around 35,000 yrs ago. The more females to males on Pleistocene tiger fossil record was proposed by Baryshnikov (2016, see attached) simply based on the size of the fossils. If you look through the tables in the paper you'll see that the dentition are around the range of the living tigress used for comparison. Is that a sure-fire conclusion? I'd say no simply because we can't remove the possibility that males tigers of the time were just relatively small. 

The living comparison tiger specimen tagged as ZIN 14997 from Turkestan, Central Asia, is about 180 kg based on its measurements. The vast majority of postcranial remains compared with this specimen are smaller, indicating most of these tigers are less than 180 kg. From that again, the author assumes the <180 kg specimens are generally female. Do note that the largest specimen in the entirety of the postcranial sample, based on a calcaneus (ZIN 37288-58), would be around 230 kg. 

This late Pleistocene tiger sample is okay in size, but almost surely would have missed the extremes in body mass. Again, there is the possibility that the dentition of this fossil tiger did not scale like that of modern tigers (which scales within itself quite weakly).

The sample that has been usually been referred to as the "Ancient Amur" is from Wahnsien, dated to about 800,000 yrs ago. These tigers would have been relatively quite primitive and likely more like the Amoy tiger than our modern Amur tiger. Remember, these specimens came before even the Trinil tiger. From these specimens, most were the same size as your modern Amur/Bengal. There metatarsal and metacarpals were more robust than modern tigers and even the prehistoric Sunda tigers, but the single humerus on record is not any more robust than modern tigers. There is also the possibility that Hooijer misidentified the metatarsal and metacarpals incorrectly, as it is the cave lion which has consistently showed to have very thick metapodials. Nonetheless, I doubt the possiblity is too strong. While a single humerus is bad to make a conclusion from, from what is available, we can't say the Wahnsien tiger was more robust than its modern relatives.  

To wrap, tiger size is very, very variable. The Sunderbans are your modern example. Perhaps it is this adaptability in its genome that allowed it to survive into present day, whereby if you think about, the vast majority of tigers (from the South China tigers all the way to Malay), have shrunk considerably. Reply