Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

An earlier conversation with @Polar reminded me of cortical bone thickness, so here's the data from Meachen-Samuels and Van Valkenburgh (2010) reorganized into species. The sample sizes of modern felids were abysmal (with lions and tigers only having 2 representative for each bone), so the trends here may not be representative of what is true for each respective species. Cortical bone thickness also decreases with age, adding some error to the measurement as well. Kavg is the measure of cortical bone thickness, averaging both the lateromedial and anteroposterior cortical measurements into one to represent a whole bone. The smaller the Kavg, the more cortical bone the species has, thus theoretically more density at at least the shaft.

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It seems that cortical bone thickness is not correlated with mass density. The jaguar, with the most weight per length of bone, as a high Kavg, indicating lesser cortical bone thickness. It seems that cortical bone thickness increases without regard to body size to mass density for other biophysical reasons. Plus, seeing the cheetah with a cortical bone thickness greater than the jaguar leaves a big question mark on the reliability of cortical bone thickness in determining built. Reply