Rainforest Leopards

[Shadow]

(04-24-2019, 02:16 PM)Luipaard Wrote:

(04-24-2019, 12:59 PM)Shadow Wrote: Two things just to be considered. It is quite clear for people who have read a lot about leopards and gorillas, that there is predation and gorillas are time to time prey for leopards. So there is no need to prove that, criticism concerning that is about it, that can someone really say, that it would happen often/frequently. Or is that a prey animal, which is in more extreme end of prey animals of leopards and happens time to time but not so regularly. There are many studies founding nothing while there are some showing, that at least some leopards are able to do that. That is interesting question even though most probably quite minor issue for both, I mean leopards and gorillas.

Then about skull measurements. Again here are mentioned jaguars. One important thing to remember is, that skull isn´t only length and width, those don´t give all relevant information about skull size. When comparing sizes of skulls of different species we can´t ignore volume of skull. Jaguar skulls appear to be much bigger when looking at overall size. Skull is three-dimensional, not two-dimensional. Leopard skull tends to be narrower and also more flat.

If comparing skulls then most interesting thing is to look at overall size, which reveals then the truth without a doubt.

Well we can check how large skulls are overall (inches)?

These are the 20 biggest male leopard skulls from scientific sources I'm aware of in terms of total score (total length + width). Note that the biggest are from either Central Africa or Iran (the biggest leopard subspecies).

*This image is copyright of its original author

Yes I like to compare leopards with jaguars in this case. So for comparison, 47 adult male jaguar skulls recorded by professional hunter Tony Almeida from the Pantanal ranged from 18.125" to 20.75". He classified any jaguar skull measuring 19" or over as huge and anything at or above 19.75" as a monster specimen.

Notice how the large ones rival Pantanal jaguar ones.

Now in comparison with South African leopards; the largest recorded skull measurements are 274mm in total length but only 153mm wide with a total score of 16.81. For comparison, skull from Gabon of a relatively young adult male leopard measured by Pocock was 267mm x 180mm.

Quote:Jaguar skulls appear to be much bigger when looking at overall size. Skull is three-dimensional, not two-dimensional. Leopard skull tends to be narrower and also more flat.

Here's some data from the paper 'The assessment of size in fossil Felidae':

"the correlation between condylobasal length and zygomatic width in jaguars and lions was similar at 0.875 and 0.855, respectively. Whereas in leopards the correlation between these measurements was weaker at 0.772. For this reason, while jaguar skulls are definitely broader relative to length in general, the broadest leopard skulls have a length to width ratio which is about the same as the the broadest jaguar skulls."

Three-dimensional was one key word in what I wrote. Overall volume of skull. It is good to remember also if comparing skulls of animals with different types of bodies overall in other ways too, it can be quite tricky and not so easily comparable just like that, what comes to overall sizes and weights of different species. Especially when animals have so different body types overall as jaguars and leopards.

Also if you take some exceptional individual measurements, then to compare in fair way you should take same kind of chart of other species. Anyway naturally even the biggest leopard skulls are smaller than biggest jaguars, so no new information here. But if wanting to discuss more about jaguar-leopard sizes, then again size comparisons thread is for sure better place even though this subject starts to be really boring when same things repeated all the time :)

But I say just this, taking exceptional individuals and trying to create image, like those would be something common... that creates questions. Maybe it is not intentional, but it is good to remember that we are talking in this thread about rainforest leopards, what is usual, what is time to time and then what is extreme/exceptional. 

For sure in rainforests can be found many male leopards weighing 60-80 kg so if that is the issue, I think that many people see it in same way. But when putting a photo of some robust leopard, that proves nothing if trying to use a photo as proof that some leopard would be, let´s say 90 kg. If there is a 30-40 kg female leopard in photo and compared to 60-70 kg male, that male for sure looks like to be a huge one. 70 kg leopard actually is quite huge looking in photos where some hunter poses with it :) 

Here one study about skulls of big cats giving overall information.

http://kmkjournals.com/upload/PDF/RJT/11/ther11_2_157_170_Sims.pdf Reply