Freak Specimens

[GuateGojira]

(06-09-2014, 10:00 PM)'Pckts' Wrote: Its up to interpretation.
In terms of "similarities"
Where are you drawing the line?
Both are cats, walk on 4 legs, roar, have canines, claws, eat meat, etc.....


But if you want to dive deeper, and try to compare on a sub species level, if the species is Panthera,
then there are quite a few differences
Different skeletal structure, size, muscle composistion, fur, social behavior, hunting technique, climate, living terrain etc...

Its to vague of a question when asking to name similarities or differences.
Both are cats, so they ofcourse are going to share much more in common than not. But there are some major, major differences between them that seperate lions and tigers as much as lions to leopards, or tigers to cheetah.


 

 

Pckts, my comparison is not a simple “this and that”. To say that “both are cats, walk on 4 legs, roar, have canines, claws, eat meat, etc.....” is simply out of question, from this point of view, a wolf is 100% related to a weasel. That is not my point here.
 
If you take the time to go deeper in my statements, you can see that those simple sentences open a wider point of view, that at this moment, no one have taken the time to see, and even less people is going to accept, at this moment. But believe me, these two cats are the less related but at the same time, the most similar between the great cats and that is what intrigued me.
 
Of course, if we take only Morphology, tigers are lions are very different; in fact, the four great cats are very different. The old statement that we can’t distinguish a lion from a tiger, without the fur, is just nonsense, as a “good” expert can do it if he knows the correct proportions. However, even these proportions are very variable and some tigers are of about the same proportions than some lions and the other way around. Morphology is easy to describe, and we know very well the characteristics of the tigers and those of the lions.
 
My new concern, at this moment, is more ecological than morphological; these two cats have evolved in two completely different habitats and with completely different prey base. However, these cats have found similar results even from different beginnings, and there is the fascinating conception of the “convergent” evolution.
 
This idea from me is too raw right now, and it was maybe a mistake to share it too soon with all of you, but like Valmik Thapar, I am going to prepare it correctly, and will try to found if this hypothesis is correct or is just a “shot to the nothing”.
 
For the moment, I believe that it will be correct to leave it as it is, and let the true point of the topic grow, which are the “freak” specimens in the world of the cats. [img]images/smilies/tongue.gif[/img]
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