Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

I've been to quiet lately, my apologies. In my free time, I've been digging through literature to uncover the Wahnsien tiger better. Remember those extremely robust canines, well at least one source has recorded something similar:

*This image is copyright of its original author

That's the only mention of tigers in the document by C.C. Young (1936?), the rest are other species. If one would like to see it, I can PM it or post it here (I'm opting not to as it isn't really about prehistoric felids). Wahnsien was teeming with species.

Anyhow, this may be of interest to some, this is a comparison of the skull of the Ngandong tiger (left) with that of a Sze-Chuan tiger (right) (presumably P.t. acutidens).

*This image is copyright of its original author

The Ngandong skull is 380 mm x 250 mm (vK has it down as 240 mm, proven to be an error by his own math and personal measurements). The Ngandong tiger skull seems very different with regard to the dentition proportions from the rest of tigers. Dentitions seem rather small, completely opposite of the modern Javan tiger.

I was left to find the length of the China skull myself. This is likely a female's, of greatest length 269 mm. The dentitions are proportionately larger than the other tiger subspecies. 

Based on these holotypes, the Wahnsien tiger is actually not very large and the seemingly small Ngandong tiger specimens are of respectable size when accounting for gender and the species exception robusticity not seen in the Wahnsien bones (bar metapodials). Of course, one specimen isn't necessarily representative of an entire species, but its the best we have. I will say this. As I continue examining fossil "tigers", the morphological differences may be strong enough to speciate, similar to the P. spelaea system. Of course, a lot of math is going into it to prove the speciation concept (e.g. ANOVA tests), and whenever all the code is written into R (somehow, the program isn't too user friendly), hopefully the manuscript will go through without being shredded too much. Reply