Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[tigerluver]

@Vinay, please do not spread misinformation that cave lions are fake or some type of Asiatic lineage. If you'd like to learn more please read my next sentence.

For cave lion information, please check out this thread.

@ronron , for phylogenies this figure from Tseng et al. (2013) is great:

*This image is copyright of its original author

Some dating has been argued (i.e. the cave lions are stated by Barnett et al. (2016) to have split nearly 2 mya from the modern lion) but functionally everything seems agreed by upon by most. Yes the tiger's closest living relative would be the snow leopard, but close in this sense is a bit meaningless, as the lineages diverged about 9 millions years ago (mya). The tiger is a very ancient species that diverged from the cat family very, very long ago and thus even its closest relative is a very distant relative.

On stripes, two things had to have occurred. Some cats early in the tiger lineage had a chance mutation that gave them stripes. Some advantage then amplified this trait. No formal study has been done on stripes in modern times but breaking the outline of the tiger is the most common reason I've read. Remember mutations come before adaptations, and the tiger may only have stripes because from all the big cat lineages, only the tiger by random chance gained stripes at some point. Reply