Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[Smilodon-Rex]

(09-10-2018, 06:59 PM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote:

(09-10-2018, 11:04 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(09-10-2018, 06:00 AM)genao87 Wrote: So how big did the prehistoric Siberian, Bengal Tigers and other modern  grew Grizz?   did they grew just as big as the Nangond Tiger??  i assume not or else we would be talking about it.   we have fossils of these past giant Siberian, Bengal Tigers?   i assume i should ask for the African Lions as well.

I know that the question is not for me, but I love to answer size related questions.

The Holocene tiger fossils (12,000 years ago) published in litterature are no larger than the modern tigers populations recorded in scientific documents. The dentitions and fragments of mandibles found in the Russian Far East are of the same size than modern Amur tigers but those before that date (Late Pleistocene) are in fact larger in all dimentions, and we clasified them in the crono-subspecies of Panthera tigris acutidens.

The long bones of Pleistocene tigers in mainland publised and available in this moment, do not show any exceptional size, but at least the metapodials (the "hand" bones) are slightly longer but more robust than those of modern tigers of any subspecies. You will not found any Bengal tiger fossil older than 12,000 as the tiger invaded the Indian subcontinent after the last Ice Age. The record from a metapodial from a "tiger" from Sri Lanka is unreliable as the analysis is very poor, from my point of view. Holocene (or modern) Bengal and Amur tigers are of the same size, with skulls of c.380 mm in scientific records and c.406 mm in hunting records, maximum weights are about 250-260 kg for both populations.

For the moment, the largest fossils of any tiger, published at least, are those from the Ngandong tiger, with a huge femur of 480 mm in total length. There is now a new mandible of no less than c.300 mm! (not published, yet..) that apparently came from an Holocene tiger, but I will love more information about it, before to make any conclusion. If we use the available information in documents, no fossil, for any tiger population, is larger than those of the Pleistocene tigers from Java, but the large skull discovered and reported here by @GrizzlyClaws in China, plus the mandible that is studied by @tigerluver now, may challenge that idea (sadly the skull is not scientific hands).

In fact, that giant mandible was dated around 50 kya, but it is closer to the modern tiger morphologically.

Since the formation of the modern tiger subspecies was occurred after the Toba eruption which was dated 75 kya.

I now start to believe that those antiquated tiger subspecies like Ngandong tiger and Wanhsien tiger were dated before the Toba eruption, while the modern tiger subspecies after.

To be honest, Ngandong tiger may not as huge as we image, the largest felines in history were prehistoric lions and giant machairodontinaes . Reply