Caspian tigers from Azerbaijan

[lfelipe86]

(06-18-2023, 02:51 PM)zulfu1903 Wrote: Hello all, 

After messaging back and forth with Mr. Peter he suggested me to add these findings to the thread as well.

Firstly, there's a recent paper about extinction of Caspian tigers and information on how scientific bias doomed the survival of this formal ssp. Full article is aviliable via - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10....50191/full

Secondly, I wanted to add my recent findings regarding the size of this ssp. As you know (mentioned by mr.Peter as well) there is quite some variation on the size of turanian tiger speciemens. Here I add 2 photos of stuffed tigers acquired by Gustav Radde from his trip to South Caucasus (Lenkeran, Azerbaijan) in 1866. Later, Satunin gives the measuremnt of skins as follows: 283 cm (173 cm body+ 110 cm tail) and 254 cm (161 cm+93 cm tail). In the Museum there's a particullarly large caspian tiger skull from Bilesuvar (North of Lenkeran) with length of 36 cm according to Satunin, 1906.  I am adding the pictures of stuffed skins from 1866 and mentioned skull below.

Good evening!! Talking about Bilesuvar, Lankaran, Caucasus, etc... I was speaking to a person who lives in Iran and he told me that about a year ago he saw a caspian tiger attack a boar near golestan national park! he also told me that his family was originaly from Neka and his grandfather saw a tiger around that region during the late 1960´s and a family member saw a tiger near Savadkuh during the 80´s, than i asked him if he knew anything abot tiger sightings in the Gilan area and he replyed that there were some reports in the Gillan and Ardabil provinces during the 1970´s and 90´s and later i´ve read that Paul Joslin found 17cm pugmarks in that region durin the 70´s.

There were reports of tigers in the area of Bilesuvar during the 70´s and the area of Lankaran and Astara during the 60´s and even during the mid 1990´s! 

For sure those could have been misidentifications of leopards because of language barriers, however we can not discard them completely! We need to take under consideration that since the 1920´s and 30´s praticaly all tigers found in the caucasus area were migrants from Iran and the possibility that at least a fill of those sightings during the late 60´s early 70´s may be actual tigers!! 

I always bring the zanzibar leopard exemple and most recently the javan tiger exemple, were hair and DNA were found!! We can never be 100% sure about tigers absence in a region, especially with so many sightings and evidence like pugmarks! we need to have in mind that java and zanzibar are very small islands and if such small places can hide tigers! the caucasus, middleeast and central asia for sure can hide tigers!! Reply