ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - A - THE TIGER (Panthera tigris)

[GuateGojira]

(03-29-2017, 06:59 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote: This means that the Caspian tigers prior their extinction didn't get genetically isolated from other tiger subspecies for very long.

Sometimes all Mainland tiger subspecies were lumped into one single category could be an interpretation that they always had some degree of genetic exchange before the human interference and artificial isolation.

That is correct. That is why I support the conclusions of Dr Kitchener and others regarding the situation of the Mainland tigers as a single subspecies. In the past, very few "natural" barriers more or less separated the populations of tigers and new studies and sub-fossils showed that tigers do lived in areas regarded as poor tiger habitats by previous authors.

Even Caspian tigers were separated from the Amur tigers at only about 200 years ago!

On the South China tigers, not even Mazák could establish a "clear" separation between the Indochina and South China tigers. Resent studies shows that part of the captive population in China is "polluted" with Indochinese genes, but another interpretation could be that in fact, they have never been separated "subspecies" after all. The cranial and morphological differences seems to be only clinal, and the small samples may not represent the full context of the old tiger populations.

Finally, there are reliable records of South China tigers as large as a relative large Indochinese or Amur tiger. Examples of this is the male of 190 kg killed in 1964 in the Shanxi Province (Kun et al., 1998) and a large skull with a greatest length of 348 mm measured by Busk (1874; this specimen had some dry tissue still attached, but probably did not interfered materially with the measurements). Mazák's largest South China tiger skull is of 342.5 mm, but from a very small sample of only 6 male specimens (Mazák, 2013).

Just my "two cents" for the conversation. Reply