Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

Okay, here we go.

Regarding the Hanko and Korsos (2007) study, it looks like they used the mandible and dentition to phylogenetically organize the species. Issue with this is that they completely overlooked the very real differences in the cranium as presented by Marciszak et al. (2014). So I guess the combination of both these studies would be of better use to classification, and neither is wrong, just not as complete as they would be together. I prefer genetic evidence on top of all this as well, and we don't have study like that yet.

On another note, I was reviewing data on cave lion skulls, and the community, including myself, have missed some of the skull issues.

P. spelaea are not necessarily superior to P. fossilis in all regards of the skull. Marciszak only focuses on snout width, whereby yes, P. spelaea had wider snouts. I think the difference is statistically just significant (due to the limited sample size of P. fossilis), but I can test it sometime to be sure. Regardless, looks like we've all taken the snout issue and extended it to the rest of the skull. 

The only complete(ish) skull of P. fossilis is from Mauer, so this will have to be the holotype we'll have to use. This skull, like the other P. fossilis skulls reported, had the narrower snout as we all know. But, the zygomatic width is quite great. This skull measures 442 mm, but the zygomatic width is 300 mm (ZW/GSL =  0.679). This is wider than a good amount of P. spelaea skulls, including the Marciszak et al. (2014). The Mauer skull is proportionately superior in terms of zygomatic width compared to all P. atrox specimens I've read of as well. If we assume that this single skull is not exceptional, we can scratch off the notion of zygomatic inferiority of P. fossilis to the other cave lions. 

It seems snout width and zygomatic width are not necessarily correlated processes, thus we can't assume P. fossilis' narrower snout equals a narrower skull. Hopefully Argant's Chateau skull measurements get a more thorough publication to see whether the Mauer skull is truly the norm. Reply