Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[Sanju]

(05-01-2019, 12:09 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote: It was the earliest form of the Sunda tiger

earliest is Panthera tigris trinilensis. right?   dating from about 1.2 million years ago that was found at the locality of Trinil, Java, Indonesia. oxygnatha is intermdiate of solensis and trinil.

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The Trinil tiger was the oldest form of a tiger that lived 1.66 million years ago in Indonesia, particularly in Java and Trinil, although according to some zoologists, it could be the ancestor of all known Indonesian subspecies. Perhaps, East Asia was a center of the origin of Pantherinae. The oldest tiger fossils found in the Early Pleistocene Javanese show that about two million years ago, tigers were already quite common in East Asia. However, the glacial and interglacial climatic variations and other geological events may have caused repeated geographic changes in the area.

Brongersma, Leo (1937). "Notes on fossil and prehistoric remains of "Felidae" from Java and Sumatra"; Eugène Dubois (1908). "Das geologische Alter der Kendengoder Trinil-Fauna"

However there were doubts that the fossil could belong to the Trinil tiger because it was too big to belong to it. But now it is thought that it might have been a bit smaller than the Bengal tigers and similar to the Indochinese tiger's size. Food competition among large carnivores is a major incentive to increase body weight, so that this Pleistocene subspecies's weight was slightly less than today's Bengal tigers and weighed about 150 kg.

Leo Daniel Brongersma (1935). "Notes on some recent and fossil cats, chiefly from the Malay Archipelago"; Helmut Hemmer (1971). "Fossil mammals of Java. II. Zur Fossilgeschichte des Tigers (Panthera tigris (L.)) in Java". Reply