Ngandong Tiger (Panthera Tigris soloensis)

[GuateGojira]

The large tiger fossils:

As we know, there are very few specimens from tigers in the Ngandong area, actually in the last review there were only 10 specimens, all of them housed in the Bandung Geological Museum (there are other specimens of tigers int he Sangiran Museum but I do not know if they belong to the Ngandong strata). This is the list of the specimens:

*This image is copyright of its original author

All the previous 5 specimens are of the same size as modern tigers, probably females or juveniles, but as the study of this fossils is very poor, there is no form to know this for sure. Now the next 5 specimens are the ones that reached or surpassed the biggest modern tigers (Bengal and Amur) and that compete with the large cave "lions" and Machairodus for the title of the biggest felids.

I decided to make the following comparative image because I still see several missinformation about these fossils, some believe that they are of the same animal, others that they are incomplete or broken, so there are weird conclutions in the web. I read that one guy belived that the femur belonged to a long legged tiger with regular sized skull (sic!). This person probably was thinking in a lynx, not in a tiger, which morphology is so well known that we know that tigers have shorter legs in comparison with they size.

Now, this is the comparative image with the fossils of the 5 large specimens and they measurements. I restored the mandible and the skull (shows in other color to avoid confusion) so we can see them in what could be they true size. I did not included weights, that will be for another image, but I can say that while the specimens of the skull and smaller humerus probably weighed between 230 - 270 kg, the biggest humerus, mandble and femur surpassed the 300 kg and reached about 370 kg. So, check them:

*This image is copyright of its original author

You can save it for your own reference, all bones are to scale.

*This image is copyright of its original author

Greetings to all! Reply