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Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

United States tigerluver Offline
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( This post was last modified: 08-16-2015, 08:29 AM by tigerluver )

@GrizzlyClaws

According to Driscoll et at. (2009), your theory on the neo Amur from Caspian is very plausible,  "with a secondary distinctive expansion eastwards (route D) colonizing the historic range of P. t. altaica in the Russian Far East." :

*This image is copyright of its original author

They also put the theory in words, stating that "less than 10,000 years ago the Caspian/Amur tiger ancestor colonized Central Asia via the Gansu Corridor (Silk Road) from eastern China then subsequently traversed Siberia eastward to establish the Amur tiger in the Russian Far East."

Driscoll et al. sets the subspecies boundaries below Manchuria. The official Wahnsien fossils come just northwest of the area in red (Chen et al. 2013):

*This image is copyright of its original author


The geographic location of the fossils compared to the modern South China tiger probably confirms that the Wahnsien is the (ancestor of) South China tiger. That could explain the primitive features of the South China tiger as well as the fact that it is quite separated from the rest of the tiger subspecies. 

The phylogenetic trees published show that the Caspian and Amur are close, and relatively distant from the South China tiger, so I guess the modern Amur isn't a hybrid, at least the ones left in the Russian far east. 

I think we should now try to define the paleo Amur tiger to figure out its phylogenetic position and whether it even existed or not. The only record I know that goes much past the Driscoll et al. South China boundary is of 2 astragali, a femur, a phalanx, a metatarsal 2, . Hooijer (1947) mentioned that these were recorded by Tscherski (1892). Hooijer stated that one astragalus was larger than his specimen and another smaller, but I only see the measurement of one astragalus in his tables. I think Hooijer typo'd the position of the larger astragalus and put it was Wahnsien tiger instead of Lyakhov tiger. 

I'll probably never find the original Tscherski document, but here's the citation in case someone can:

TSCHERSKI, J. D. 1892. Beschreibung der Sammlung posttertiairer Saugethiere. Mem. Acad. Imp. Sci. St.-Petersbourg, ser. 7, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 1-511, pls. 1-6. 

Back to the topic, these fossils were found all the way here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshoy_Lyakhovsky_Island

and also in the Jana river: 

*This image is copyright of its original author


At first, I doubted Tscherki's confidence that the fossils were tiger. Further reading in Hooijer (1947) states that the Siberian fossils were identical to the Wahnsien ones, the metapodial was extremely robust. To Hooijer, this removes the possibility of Tscherski misidentifying P. spelaea/fossilis specimens as tiger. 

"Tigers of the World" thinks otherwise, citing Barnett et al. conclusions that two fossils (not Tscherki's specimens) found on Lyakhov island in 1998 were most certainly cave lion based on DNA data. 

Therefore, we have two possibilities. Tscherki's wrong and we still don't have official proof of a paleo Siberian tiger or the cave lion and tiger coexisted, or almost coexisted chronologically, as in P. spelaea went extinct and P. tigris took over its space soon after. Tscherski's fossils have gone missing or at least are inaccessible like vK's fossils, so DNA testing is out of the question. We can attempt a morphological comparison of Krillinova's far eastern Russian cave lion with the Wahnsien tiger to see which of the aforementioned possibilities is more likely. 


Tscherski did not publish the greatest width of his astragalus, so we have to assume Hooijer's specimen's proximal width measurements is close enough to Krillinova's greatest width measurement. Hooijer's astragalus measures 61 mm in length and 57 mm in proximal width, robusticity ratio 0.93. Krillinova's astragalus measures 70 mm in length and 57 mm in greatest width, robusticity ratio 0.83. Would you think the ~11% difference is intraspecific or interspecific? The cave lion of NW Germany seem to have astragali of around robustiity ratio of 0.80 as well, taking measurements from Diedrich's photos. Looking at the cave lion astragali, the proximal width prescribed by Hooijer is likely not the greatest width, thus the difference between Tscherski's specimens and cave lions published is likely a bit greater. 

So let's discuss what exactly is the paleo Amur tiger. What do you guys think about the Tscherski fossils?
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Messages In This Thread
RE: Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines - tigerluver - 08-16-2015, 08:24 AM
Sabertoothed Cats - brotherbear - 06-11-2016, 11:59 AM
RE: Sabertoothed Cats - peter - 06-11-2016, 04:28 PM
Ancient Jaguar - brotherbear - 01-04-2018, 12:45 AM



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