Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

@GrizzlyClaws, I forgot to get to the other discussion points.

I'd say the combination of distantly related and subspecies simply equals a species. Subspecies is a weird term and maybe is better off dropped, and different populations of a single species be defined as ecotypes. Sotnikova and Foronova, who have done the best analysis of all three of the cave lions, believes each of them are distinct from the lion, so species rather than subspecies.

Looking at paleoart as well as fossils, the lion clad probably arrived in waves into Eurasia (Yamaguchi 2004, Sabol 2011a, Sotnikova and Foronova 2014?, Sotnikova and Nikolskyi 2006). This would imply that the three forms are not subspecies if there were replacement events. Now, if the new population waves interbred with each other rather than replaced each other, we have a pandemic species with ecotypes. The latter scenario probably isn't true as the maned lion would have most certainly been contemporary with at least the late P. spelaea population, yet there is no evidence of hybrid traits. 

I took another look at the Barnett et al. (2009) study, and they have P. atrox closer to P. leo than P. spelaea, opposite to Hanko and Korsos (2007). I wish I had more time at the moment to put everything together, but it seems that genetic, cranial, and mandibular studies aren't in agreement with each other as I do some of my own analysis. P. fossilis has been ignored or passed off as "P. spelaea senior" for quite some time, and I think this is where the problems of contradictory findings are stemming from. Reply