Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

@genao87:


The current consensus is that the South China tiger was the stem tiger, at least for the Amur, Bengal, and Indochinese subspecies, which split 10,000 years ago. The fossil Chinese tigers in museums were found more toward central and south China than the Amur's modern range. Moreover, these fossil tigers, skull wise, look like a South China tiger rather than an Amur.

Regarding the size, the issue started when everyone figured out Anyonge equations (the equation used to give the original 470 kg) were overestimating mass. Anyonge made a major mistake, he took literature, like Mazak's 325 kg Amur record for example, and applied it to any bone he found in museum collections. (he didn't necessarily use these numbers exactly, but the idea is the same). One can see the problem with this method.

Dr. Chrisiansen did the heavy lifting, contacted some zoos, and found tiger skeletons with live weights attached. These produced the most reliable equations to date. It's no secret that prehistoric tigers are my greatest interest, so once I was able to work with professors, I ventured to try and get my own analysis of the species' morphology. I found a couple of extra with weights attached at the Smithsonian, and I added them to Christiansen's database to formulate a tiger specific set of allometric equations. I then acquired the original book that published the Ngandong tiger fossils and took extra measurements, finding that the bones are (or maybe were, as not a soul can seem to find where these bones went, including Phds. I've contacted, and the museum doesn't seem to have an accessible collections correspondence) more robust than usual for a tiger. From that, the numbers gave me a high end value of 470 kg or over (again, I can't give exacts). This has taken me about 2 years, it is extremely hard to get data on Asian fossils, and the specimens I need for equations just don't exist in the US (as a result, Anyonge, van Valkenburg, Figuerido et al., and many others used the problematic methods for equations).

The American and Cave lions are most closely related to the lion. Christiansen stated otherwise, but the vast majority of researchers have reason to reject these theories. Judging by the fact that the stem group of cave lions and modern lions all came from Africa, it is probably correct to assume that these were part of the lion clad, but not necessarily a subspecies of lion. Reply