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

[GrizzlyClaws]

(04-02-2017, 10:06 AM)GuateGojira Wrote: 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.

Another good example is that the construction of the Great Wall had artificially isolated the Amur tiger and South China tiger from each other for over 2000 years.

There is other alternative theory suggests that the huge diversity of the Bengal tiger was the result of the intermingling of the different tiger population. Prior the migration of the Bengal tiger, there was a group of South China tiger had made a unsuccessful attempt to colonize India. During that period, India was still made of hot dry desert, so this particular tiger population didn't last very long, and their remaining population could get absorbed into the gene pool of the later arrived Bengal tiger. The Bengal tiger from Northeast India was already proven to have a high degree of Indochinese tiger ancestry. So it wouldn't be out of question that the modern Bengal tiger also contains a bit ancestry of the paleo-South China tiger. Reply