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Pleistocene Big Cats
Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines
Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines
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Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines
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The Amur tiger didn't reach their true potential until they had fully monopolized the top of the food chain after the end of the Pleistocene era.
The fossil evidence showed that the late Pleistocene Amur tiger was only slightly larger than the modern one, because at that time they were coexisting with many other Pleistocene predators, so their size potential was hindered. The mass extinction of the Pleistocene mega predators probably had benefited the Amur tiger and pushed them at the top of the food chain in the coming post-Pleistocene period. Let's assume from the start of the Holocene period at 10,000 BC to the rise of the Human civilization in the East Asia (China) at 3,000 BC, a period of 7000 years was mostly vacant in the history book, and we didn't know anything about the Amur tiger population during that period. And I would assume that period was probably the golden age for the Amur tiger.   *This image is copyright of its original author Modern leopard femur:  *This image is copyright of its original author The purpose of this post is to try to figure out what the top left, Trinil femur is. I know some scimitar toothed cats were found in Trinil, but I could not find any images of complete femurs for comparison, so I went S. fatalis as the closest comparison. The lower femur is of the modern leopard, which does not match in my eyes either. What do you folks think as too which species the Trinil femur is closer to?
After writing on the Trinil mandibles, I don't think it is. The specimen is between 70-90 kg but clearly an adult. The other Trinil specimens I found to be around 200 kg. Maybe the Trinil femur could be of a small female, but femur's anatomy doesn't fit a tigers.
The shaft is proportionately very thick but the extremities are thin. The proximal:distal ratio is larger than what is found in tigers and even in the Ngandong femur. The head of the proximal femur is also thinner than what is in tigers, or any large modern pantherine for that matter. Brongersma also noticed how the cross sectional shape of the shaft differed from that of the island tiger femurs. The other Ngandong femur vK labeled as Panthera sp., meaning unidentified, does not exactly match the Trinil femur either but seems closer. At the moment, I am leaning toward the Trinil femurs being some form of primitive leopard rather than tiger.
New big cat fossil from the Northeastern part of China, is this one a Cave lion? @tigerluver
 *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
Nice find at @GrizzlyClaws!
The convex profile and the little extrusion at the symphysis makes me think cave lion. Kirillova's specimens a hundred miles up north for comparison:  *This image is copyright of its original author
It seems to belong to a Siberian Cave lion, and the specimen must belong to a fairly large male with a skull around 40 cm.
With 45 pages here this topic may have already been covered. Would you ( readers ) think that our early ancestors were the choice prey animals for such big cats as Dinofelis? http://www.maropeng.co.za/news/entry/din...ood_feline
 *This image is copyright of its original author
I recently read that article and I think that there is obviously a prey preference for big cats but they still need diversity and I don't think any animal targets one species only. Obviously we would be easy prey so until we were able to stand up to them, they would take advantage of us. But obviously human beings were not easy prey once we developed fire and tools and we are quite dangerous when angered, so I think its probably in most predators interest to not test their luck with human beings that often.
Paleobiology of sabretooth cat Smilodon populatorin the Pampean Region (Buenos Aires Province, Argentina) around the Last Glacial Maximum: Insights from carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in bone collagen - Bocherens et al. 2016.
 *This image is copyright of its original author The above was the abstract figure for the paper, and sums up the findings very succinctly. Key points (mixed in my analysis to supplement the info): S. populator This species primarily preyed upon Macrauchenia. Weighing around a ton according to some sources (cannot verify), the predator:prey size ratio would be 1:2.  *This image is copyright of its original author Two ground sloths also comprised some of the S. populator diet. Namely, Lestodon (2-4 Imperial tons/1-2 metric tonnes?) and Megatherium (6 imperial tons/3 metric tonnes?) were a significant portion of the diet, albeit Macrauchenia still comprised a much heftier amount. If S. populator was hunting the biggest of such game, I assume group living would be the only way. S. populator and its prey species were confined to open grasslands. Protocyon is molecularly shown to somewhat compete with S. populator for the same prey but the authors also theorizes that this dog-like animal may have scavenged Smilodon kills instead of exclusively hunting the aforementioned prey species.
Cave lion hair
A while back, I posted on a hair sample from Kirillova et al. (2015) that was stated to have a follow up study. Well, that study is out. At the time, the paper said the hair was red while showing a black and white photograph, but now we have this gem:  *This image is copyright of its original author The source is Morphological and genetic identification and isotopic study of the hair of a cave lion (Panthera spelaea Goldfuss, 1810) from the Malyi Anyui River (Chukotka, Russia) (Chernova et al. 2016). DNA was extracted from the hair and a phylogenetic tree was created. Only species seen on this tree were compared to (thus no tiger or snow leopard DNA was used for comparison).  *This image is copyright of its original author Summarizing: 1. Like the modern lion, the cave lion as 4 types of hair, two guard hairs (upper layer) and two downy hairs (under layer). 2. The cave lion had a dense and thick undercoat consisting of compacted, wavy hair. This is likely the product of adaptation to the frigid climates of the time. 3. The cave lion was colored somewhat different from the modern lion, but for simpler terms, refer to the photo. 4. Most structural traits of the hair between the cave lion and modern lion are similar but there are clear distinctions from both the Asiatic and African lion forms.
The attached paper is a must read. It looks at tiger and cave lion bones in the same locality. Get on it quick, I'll get back here later.
@Polar, it's opening fine on my end. What browser are you using? Maybe the default opening settings on your machine accidentally changed?
Here is a direct link.
The "Amur" tiger of the Late Pleistocene
This will be a summary and analysis of the paper attached in my last post by Baryshnikov (2016). The tiger bones in the study are around 40,000 years old. That puts them in the late Pleistocene, and in one of the warmer phases. These are probably the first official tiger bones to be found furthest north, essentially in the Amur tiger's modern range.  *This image is copyright of its original author So for starters, the theory many cite as the tiger expanding up north starting 10,000 years is completely debunked. Rather, Baryshnikov theorizes there were at least 2 waves of migration, and one of those was 10,000 years ago. A lesson here is that gene chronology still needs a lot of work. Extensive morphological analysis is difficult as there are not many complete bones and the mostly complete mandible we have is of a subadult and is not representative of the adult form. Baryshnikov found the dental characteristic of this sample to be the same as those found in Wahnsien (600-800 kya earlier) and other fossil tigers, ignoring size. The author went on to conclude a few slight teeth morphology differences that are not too significant as they fall within the range of intraspecific variation. Looking at the mandibles myself, the subadult mandible of 204 mm (like 210 mm complete) has very large dentition. However, the other mandibles who would be somewhat larger than the subadult mandible have smaller teeth. Therefore, the subadult teeth to mandible proportions are likely a product of age rather than species traits. The other two mandibles are of adults and indicate that similar to the larger tiger subspecies and the Sunda prehistoric species (modern Sunda species show the opposite trend), this early "Amur" tiger had small teeth for its skull. Postcranial remains show a tiger of average robusticity. The metapodials that were uniquely wide in the Wahnsien tiger are of slightly above average to average thickness in the newer sample. It seems by 40 kya the tiger had its more slender modern form for that most part. Size-wise, even though the sample is most composed of females according to Baryshnikov, most specimens are under 200 kg. There is a larger calcaneus that may be of 250-260 kg specimen. The cave lions sharing eastern Russia with this tiger seems to be about the same size, interestingly probably the smallest cave lion population I've examined (perhaps the UK population of cave lions was of similar size). The giant cave lions were off to the west of Russia, between the Urals and Germany. Even if the cave lions in this area were slightly larger (considering how many <170 kg tigers are in the new sample), the niche between the tiger and cave lion likely overlapped to beyond sustainable levels. |
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