Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

@genao87, I think there was a poster actually named "Tiger Lover" on AvA, but I've always been "tigerluver" since I joined the community. Regardless, if we have met, sorry for forgetting. I hope life's treating you better now.

From what scant material we have left and chronological studies, it seems that the fossil tiger in China we've been looking at is more South China tiger-esque than the more recently evolved Amur tiger. There are a couple skulls in the American Natural History Museum up in New York, but they're too damaged to see if they were wide for their length. @GrizzlyClaws' subfossils may very well be a truer Amur, nonetheless.

For now, I assume that the earlier tiger had thinner skulls, based on the how the modern Amoy form looks today and the Ngandong skull. @GrizzlyClaws does point out that the large skull from China looks quite wide, but obviously we've lost that one from record for any analysis, and in person, relatively thinner cat skulls still look very impressive. 

The two Pleistocene tiger skulls lack sagittal crests that the Amur form has today also. In felids as a whole, skulls have evolved to become wider and more impressive in the modern felids compared to the older ones. Cats came from a weasel-like animal, so the thinner skull are likely caused by the relatively closer relationship to the mother species of felidae. 

Hooijer found a 42 mm upper p4 that may have been from an individual of a greatest skull length of over 445 mm when I used the Ngandong skull as a basis of estimation. That's a 350-380 kg cat by modern built. Ignoring robusticity, that is about the same mass as the largest Ngandong tiger based only on femur length (which I've estimated at around 400 kg). The thing that set the Ngandong tiger apart is it extremely wide bones, which has led me to find it weighing around 470 kg at the highest. (The mass estimates I'm giving here are not exactly what I have, as I can't publish exact data due to the embargo by prospective publishers, but they're functionally close enough). Maybe the Pleistocene Chinese tiger could be heavier for its frame as well, but we have not enough long bone data. If the new canine @GrizzlyClaws is truly of the Wahnsien tiger, then that may be of a 400 kg cat as well. What is problematioc about teeth is that they can sometimes be oversized or undersized relative to the true skull length, and thus estimating mass becomes a bit less reliable.

@GrizzlyClaws and @Fieryeel, does the second tooth look like a lower canine to you guys as well? If it is, it's out of the range of even the large leopard of the Sunda shelf. From the view in the first picture, the shape seem within the variation of cats and considering the accepted Ngandong mandible thinness is a characterizing trait. Reply