Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[GuateGojira]

(01-14-2022, 06:43 AM)tigerluver Wrote: The Watualang mandible is 254 mm with the anterior symphysis and coronoid process missing. Probably 260 to 270 mm complete.

In this case, guessing that the mandible is about 265 mm long, we can try to reconstruct its size compared to other modern tigers.

I got a sample of 58 skulls with an asociated mandible (39 are from wild specimens), all of them males and from different subspecies/populations. This is the result:

*This image is copyright of its original author

As we can see, there is an strong relation between the length of the mandible and the greatest skull length. Now, if we use only wild specimens, this is the result:

*This image is copyright of its original author

We can check that the difference in the relation is minimal and it is known that tiger skulls do not have a great variation in captivity like, for example, the lions. However, there is a peak there that is creting problems and that is the skull reported by Baikov, with a GSL of 400 mm but a mandible length of only 240 mm. Mazák (2013) mentioned that is posible that this skull was incorrectly measured or that Baikov measured the mandible in another form that the one that Zoologist do. So I remouved this specimen and check what happen:

*This image is copyright of its original author

When we remouve this outliner value the relation is even stronger, so we can safetilly use the mandible length to estimate the GL of the skull in male tigers. The other outliner (not as dramatic as the other) in the graphic is the large skull of 370 mm in GSL and only 230 mm in ML, that based in DNA it came from Malaysia (Heino et al., 2018).

Using the equation generated by Excel, using only the wild specimens, and excluding the skull reported by Baikov, we can estimate a GSL of about 393 mm for the mandible from Watualangat, which is larger than the complete skull found in Ngandong (something that was pointed out by others already) but is still smaller than the huge skull of 406 mm reported (not measured) by Mazák.

Now, there is something interesting. When I use only the skulls for the Amur tigers, I got this result:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The correlation is strong but not as much as the overall sample, but what happen when I remouve the captive specimens and the Baikov record? Check this:

*This image is copyright of its original author

The result is that we have one of the strongest correlations on record and also indirectly we can see that the value of the mandible in the giant skull reported by Mazák did match the other ones, adding points to its reliability.


What can I conclude on this? Using the mandible length we can get a reliable for to estimate the size of the skull in male tigers, also that while the skull reported by Baikov seems to have errors, the one reported by Mazák seems to be more reliable at the light of values. And finally that the mandible from Watualang came from an specimen that was bigger than those from Ngandong, at exception of the one with the big femur. Reply