Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[GrizzlyClaws]

(12-02-2018, 11:19 AM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(12-02-2018, 07:46 AM)Ghari Sher Wrote: OK, so this is a thread which I haven't looked through very deeply, so maybe someone has mentioned this before and I am not aware, but there is a preliminary publication (NOT peer-reviewed) out by Shaheer Sherani, where he comes up with a mass estimate of 486kg for the largest specimen of P. t. soloensis (not sure if that's even a valid subspecies any longer given the recent tiger lumping but there you go), the notorious 480mm femur.

I am going to coment only regarding the subspecies issue.

The lumping of the tiger subspecies is only for the modern ones, not the prehistoric, for the moment. The Ngandong tiger (Panthera tigris soloensis) was the last Pleistocene subspecies of tigers in the Sunda shelf and direct decendent of the large mainland tiger Panthera tigris acutidens. In this case the subspecies is still valid, for the moment.

Now, all the tigers that evolved after the Toba eruption (c.75,000 years B.C.) came from a single population that was interconnected until about 12,000 years B.C. when the last ice age ended and the Sunda populations were separated forming the subspecies Panthera tigris sondaica, while the mainland populations were completelly interconnected until the arrival of the humans, some populations been separated only about 100-200 years A. C. like the Caspian/Amur tigers or the India/Sundarbans tigers. The diferences on the mainland tiger subspecies Panthera tigris tigris, both in skull and coat pattersn, are minimal and are only clinal.

The Padang specimen was likely lived after the Toba eruption, so a descendant of the survivors.

However, the Padang specimen was still gargantuan, and it looked like the population had recovered its size in merely thousand years.

Perhaps the main reason of tiger's decreasing size was not the Toba eruption, but the complete change of the ecosystems after the Pleistocene era. Reply