Brander, Hewett and the Maharaja of Cooch Behar: a review to the records

[GuateGojira]

The Maharaja of Cooch Behar (1908) Thirty-seven years of Big Game Shooting in Cooch Behar, the Duars and Assam – a rough diary:

The Maharaja of Cooch Behar was a great hunter and his lists of records is by far the best among the tigers. I was the first one in putting together all his figures in a table, using not only the large ones in his final tables, but also those on the text. The original results have change slightly trough this time, but in my last review, I put every single one of the figures in order to study the changes and variations using correlation figures. The tables for males and females and the final table are presented here:

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

None of the tables includes the “gorged” or the “full of beef” specimens. The blue figures are those of the final tables. The black figures are those at the text. There is the popular though that the records of Cooch Behar are biased because only its large males were used (Schaller, 1967), however this is true IF you only use those figures in the final tables. I have used all the figures, including those in the book. This provides the best tables about tiger morphology, compared only by those published by the modern Siberian Tiger Project!

Incredible, again, my data and that of peter don’t match. However in this occasion I do have the full book and I can assure to all that I have taken great care with all the figures and as the list shows, I have presented both the “over curves” average (in the large tables) and the “between pegs” averages (in the summary table). The figures of the Maharaja are the only ones that we can correct the measurements reliably, as the average difference between these measurements (over curves and between pegs) was of 14 cm for males and 12 cm for females.

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The authors:

Like an “extra” to this post, here are the pictures of two of these great authors:

Sir John Prescott Hewett:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Maharaja Nripendra Narayan Bhup Bahadur, from Cooch Behar:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Archibald Alexander Dunbar Brander:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Sadly I could not found a larger picture of Dunbar Brander, because the page ask me to log in in order to access the image. Here is the LINK

Greetings to all. :)

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