Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[Polar]

(01-17-2016, 09:02 AM)tigerluver Wrote: Kirillova et al. 2015 cited 60 kya old P. speleaa leaving at the furthest northeast edge of Russia this year. No one has explored the Himalayan fossil fauna too much. South(east) and at least the lower half of China have been solely controlled by the tiger as the resident large Panthera. 

I don't think I've read an official record of Manchurian P. spelaea. There possibly existed a P. youngi, which some say is synonymous with the cave lion (Harington), others say it is simply a tiger (Hooijer), or its own species. All parties are working with scant remains and no DNA testing has been done on these P. youngi specimens. Morphology of the skull is prone to rapid convergent evolution and in my opinion can cause false relationships between species, as happened in Christiansen and Harris (2009) on their postulated link between P. onca and P. atrox.

The reason why I asked about the possible Himalayan occupation of cave lions was because there are old Nepali tales of large lions living in the snowy regions of the range without much developed manes. Reply