Freak Specimens

[Dennis]

(11-29-2019, 01:25 AM)Shadow Wrote:

(11-29-2019, 12:46 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(11-28-2019, 11:56 PM)Shadow Wrote: That photo is the reason why I say, that Jaipur was a sad case :/ What comes to Guinness and tiger claimed to have been 389 kg, they recently changed the text and it isn´t anymore said to be certain. And yes, the tiger in Smithsonian museum doesn´t look like to be that huge. If I have understood right, it´s a little bit shorter than Jaipur (body length). 

I have said it before and I do think, that 300 kg is upper limit or very close to it, what even an exceptional big cat can weight (tiger or lion) and still could be able to survive in the wild (still agile and fast enough to catch something). One reason is, that every captive big cat which I have seen and has really been over 300 kg (for sure or most probably) have had signs of obesity. Imo 389 tiger in wild should be  h u g e  if real. Way bigger than Jaipur what comes to shoulder height and body length.

Someone else can see it differently, but I´m too cynical to believe all what have been claimed in the past.

Actually the case of Jaipur and all the tigers of the called "Lady tiger" is all a very sad case, check this out: https://bigcatrescue.org/joan-byron-mara...n-society/

About the 389 kg tiger, Gerald Wood says that is valid and was confirmed by Dr Henry W Setzer, Curator of Mammals at the US Museum in that time. The problem is that in the files of the Smithsonian they describe that the skull of that tiger was of just 14 inches long (356 mm), which just average for a male tiger, not a record. Also, while the stuffed specimen can't say much (skin can be streched or shrinked), the picture of the specimen shows a large tiger, but not as big for a specimen of that weight, check it:

*This image is copyright of its original author

I will estimate this tiger at about 272 kg at the most, as it match the size of other big tigers like the Sauraha male. So, the picture shows a large male, but not a giant of over 300 kg. The skull reported, IF is of the same animal, suggest a much smaller animal of average size. Now, there is documentation that confirmed that the tiger was weighed in a sugar mill, but we still need to know how reliable was that scale.

For all those "details" is that I no longer accept as valid the record of the tiger of 857 kg. The same happen with the lion of 313 kg, when I investigated about it, it results that while Campbell (1937) says that was checke by several people, he never said who was that "people", he never said that were officials or animal experts, they could be only friends of Lennox Anderson, and again, it was weighed in a local railway scale and we can't know how accurate it was. In this case, there is no other evidence of this lion apart from the original report and this picture:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Again, based in this stuffed specimen, it looks like an averge sized lion of barely 180 kg at the most!!! The same happened when I checked the record of the "giant" lion maneater of Mufuwe, that apparently measured 320 cm in total length, but at the end resulted that those measurements were taken along the curves and the skull of the "giant" lion was of only about 364 mm (based in the figure 9 of Dr Patterson's book of 2004), average for an East African lion.

So, or those "giant" lions and tigers had very small heads, or the scales used (sugar mill and railway scale) were inaccurate, or it was just a case of incorrect information. Whatever happened, I don't think that any of those giants is accurate.

For the moment, the heaviest lions and tigers, recorded by scientists are about 272 kg, and already belong to really big cats, and I can estimate, like you, that about 300 kg will be the maximum reliable for a wild cat in modern days. Figures of specimens of over 350 kg belong to the old Pleistocene cats of Eusaria and America.

I asked from WCS Russia and Dale Miquelle replied. But his answer was, that they didn´t know. They haven´t studied that subject at all. In one article from zoo in China, was mentioned, that their tigers were about 10% heavier in winter time compared to summer time. I am interested about this because I think, that it could offer at least partial explanation for Siberian tiger reputation from the past. If there has been in the past some really exceptional tiger(s) about 300 kg in the summer time, with "winter fat" it might actually have been 330-350 kg.

Source for the article from a zoo in China saying that? Is that Harbin zoo correct? Reply