Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

Very good hypothesis, I agree.

I think the Trinil tiger is likely not the parent of the Wahnsien tiger. Beyond the morphological differences, we have a chronological issue.

ShaoKun (2013) (see attached) brings to light the issue with the dating of the P.t. acutiden faunal level of Granger and Hooijer in Wahnsien. This document states, " The Dayakou fauna and the Upper Cave fauna of Pingba, both in the Yanjinggou area (Wahnsien), are correlated to the middle Early Pleistocene and the early Middle Pleistocene in age, respectively."

This is early, as early as the previous Trinil date. Now I'll turn our understanding of tiger evolution upside down.

I've just read that abstract of Joordens et al. (2014). This has left us with more questions of tiger evolution than answers: "We dated sediment contained in the shells with 40Ar/39Ar and luminescence dating methods, obtaining a maximum age of 0.54 ± 0.10 million years and a minimum age of 0.43 ± 0.05 million years. This implies that the Trinil Hauptknochenschicht is younger than previously estimated.

540 kya-430 kya, that's just about a 100 kya than the Ngandong site. Not significantly more primitive than P.t. soloensis. Rather, my suspicion might be correct, there is no difference P.t. soloensis and P.t. trinilensis. 100 kya is likely not enough to cause gigantism between the two fossil types in my opinion, especially as there were not any major environmental pressure difference within this time range. 

von Koenigswald had the Trinil and Ngandong sites as representing the same species (ignoring his Felis paleojavanica tag for the giant specimens). There's no early Pleistocene true tiger on record as we thought the Trinil tiger was supposed to be.

From this, we're missing a major chunk of the tiger lineage of the lower Pleistocene or some Pantherine has been misidentified. 
 

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