Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[GrizzlyClaws]

(12-02-2018, 12:07 PM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(12-02-2018, 11:39 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote: 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.

The document of Cooper et al. (2016) shows for the first time the reach of the Toba eruption and its significance to the tiger populations. Theorized that the population of tigers in the Sunda shelf shoul be completelly extinct after this even. However it fails in explain how the Sunda tiger populations recovered not only its size but also the narrow skull even after this extinction event. Did the mainland tigers that re-invaded the Sunda just changed to exactly the same characteristics from the previous population, or some Sunda tigers could survive the event. Probably the model from Cooper and his team need to be verified again. That is why I think that the models of Kitchener & Dugmore (1999) are more accurate.

According to @tigerluver study, the Padang tiger looked closely related to the modern Mainland tigers by those morphological features.

Perhaps it was a hybrid population between the migrating Mainland tigers and the remaining survivors of the Sunda tiger population after the Toba eruption.

In order to cope this theory, we have to assume that the contemporary Mainland tigers were also gigantic like its Sunda cousins. Reply