ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - B - THE LION (Panthera leo)

[GuateGojira]

(02-12-2020, 07:20 AM)Pantherinae Wrote: Oh sorry my bad, where have you read it was abnormally bulky?

The known facts are that we know that the lion was killed for killing cattle and that weighed 272 kg, now we know that all the cats that kill cattle are: 1-light in weight and in bad shape , 2-heavy in weight and in very bulky. Definitelly this lion, like those from southwest Africa (Etosha and Hobatere, for example) are very fat for killing cattle and like Gerald Wood said, those big tigers (and lions) in the past that weighed so much were cattle killers and consequently very bulky. Now, this "bulkiness" is not normal, so that lion was obviously abnormally bulky, proof of that is that the heaviest lions that I manage to found in the area were two males of about 235 kg, one came from Rowland Ward Records fo Big Game (234 kg) and its reliability will be allways open to debate, the other one is the male "Puyol" (235 kg) which according with the people that captured him it had stomach content on him. The next heaviest male is a male of 230 kg in the Aberdares, Kenya (no other information is available for the specimen) and after that all the other weights are less than 205 kg, and this is from a sample of 71 males from the entire area. This means that those big lions were exceptional or that included some stomach content. There is a difference of 37 kg between the 272 kg giant lion and the biggest one of my sample, which certainly makes it exceptional and because that body mass was created for its taste for the ease-prey domestic cattle, that bulkiness was not normal. Interesting is the fact that in Southern Africa the male lions reach bigger figures with weights up to 250 kg "empty" (especifically South Africa), which is the better candidate to compite with the Bengal tigers for the heaviest cat today. Tigers from Kaziranga and lions from the Crater don't count, as there is no information of them at this moment and all is just speculation. Reply