The Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea and Panthera fossilis)

[GrizzlyClaws]

(08-31-2017, 04:54 AM)tigerluver Wrote: Generally the skull's greatest length is 1.5x that of the mandible's length. So a 310 mm mandible could have a skull of 465 mm. Often, excessive mandibles don't have a cranium that is 1.5x longer but even then, the skull of this mandible must've been comfortably around 430 mm. The Chinese canine probably had a skull a  bit smaller then.

It's interesting to see that the cave lion being both relatively recent and still approaching and may matching the size of P. fossilis. This could explain why the tiger fossils that were found to overlap with cave lion were comparatively small. Those tigers assumed the niche of the smaller cat.

The upper canine teeth of the 38 cm Beringian Cave lion skull is only 12 cm. So 38 * 1.25 = 47.5 cm

The Chinese canine is 25% larger, then it must have came from a much larger specimen if we make a comparison between two conspecific specimens. The lower canine of the Russian mandible is 13 cm, and it does look match the size with the 15 cm Chinese upper canine.

BTW, the Amur tiger used to capture the niche position in the ecosystems as a smaller cat in the late Pleistocene era, but after the extinction of the Cave lion, the Amur tiger got no more nemesis that kept dominating them in the ecosystems, and they probably managed to seize in a higher position in the ecosystems in a brief period after the Pleistocene era until the rise of the human.

I do suspect that the period between the extinction of the Cave lion and the full rise of the human civilization was the true golden age for the Amur tiger. This period probably lasted about a couple of thousands years, where the Amur tiger monopolized the entire ecosystems in the northeastern part of Asia as the sole dominant big cat. This dominance probably ended after the rise of the more advanced human civilization which affected them more than those earlier humans from the tribal society. Just look how the construction of the Great Wall alone in the 220 BC had already isolated their gene exchange with other tiger groups. Reply