Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[GuateGojira]

(01-16-2022, 08:17 AM)LonePredator Wrote: @GuateGojira Just wanted to hear your opinion on the Bornear Tiger from Pleistocene. Weren't the fossils too fragmented? Also can we safely say that the Bornean Tiger completely dwarfed all other felines that we know of??

And do you have any size estimates? Like length, height and weight of the Bornean Tiger? Was it significantly bigger than all the other giant species or was the size difference not that big?

Well, although the fossil is actually just a fragment of mandible, that is not impediment for Paleontologist to estimate the size of extint animals. The great advantage here is that this is an animal that we actually know (is a regular tiger, just that much bigger), so we can use modern specimens to estimate its size and weight in a reliable form.

To say that this tiger dwarfed all other modern and prehistoric cats in history is to risky, as we will need to make more studies. For the moment, the largest cat (body dimentions) that I know is the cave "lion" Panthera spelaea fossilis, represented by the huge skull of 484.7 mm in greatest length (the biggest skull for any felid at this moment) and the heaviest cat will be Smilodon populator, which certainly surpassed the 400 kg, using the specimen housed in Paris. So, probably this giant Pleistocene tiger from Borneo could match them in size and weight.

I still don't make any size estimation for this specimen, but based in the study Sherani (2019) this is certainly the biggest fossil tiger at this moment, with an estimated body mass of C.480 kg, although personally I think that the figure of 427.8 kg, based in the mandible length (check the paper for details) is the more reliable one. Reply