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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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I already sent him the invitation to join this forum.
BTW, here is some additional info about the tooth. Quote:5 3/8 inches straight line.
Another lower canine tooth from the Pleistocene tiger in China.
The tooth has proportionally shorter crown and very long trench-like marks on the crown, so it is a tiger lower canine tooth.  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
I only know this one was found in China, but the exact location is not known.
It looks very similar to the one from the Solo River in both size and shape, so definitely a conspecific specimen. However, the Ngandong tiger tooth looks more fossilized than this one, so this tooth might be a more recent specimen.
I forgot to ask about this before. What is the modern range of upper and lower canine sizes, including total length and length above root/gum?
For the modern tiger, the largest upper canine from the gum line for the wild specimen is 7.5 cm and the lower canine can exceed 6 cm on some occasion.
When we talk about the entire length for the upper/lower canine, then 12 cm/10 cm is more common for the average tiger specimens.
tiger lower canine tooth (modern bone clone replica and the Pleistocene specimens)
 *This image is copyright of its original author lion lower canine tooth (modern bone clone replica and the Pleistocene specimen)  *This image is copyright of its original author
So that Solo river tooth and this new one might be of a large tiger for today's standard.
That tooth in the bottom picture, was that the one with the Manchurian mandible?
Those fangs are definitely belong to the record size for the modern tiger.
And the lower canine tooth at the bottom belongs to the 33 cm mandible.
Do you think the Fossilis-Atrox lineage could be a distantly related subspecies to the modern lion?
 *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author
All the cave lions are definitely most closely related to the lion, at this point the combination of genetic and morphological evidence doesn't leave room another argument. Tseng et al. (2013) (the P. blytheae document) published a phylogenetic tree combining all methods of classification:
 *This image is copyright of its original author Christiansen pushed the idea that P. atrox was more like a jaguar, but since then every paper I've read has attacked this claim, either explicitly or subtly. Tseng et al. (2013) put all author data together and came up with the above.
The Panthera atrox being more jaguar-like is the trait of the convergent evolution.
Overall, I think it shouldn't be a big deal to distinguish the fossils between the Pleistocene tiger and the Pleistocene lion. When it is a tiger, it would be surely tiger-like and lion-like for the lion. I got the impression maybe the Fossilis-Atrox lineage is actually a distantly related subspecies, while the Spelaea lineage is a sister species, could this be possible?
I'll get back to you on that tomorrow.
Until then, I found this abstract, but I can't find the paper: A cladistic analysis of the teeth and mandible morphological characters of Pleistocene lions from Hungary ESZTER HANKÓ1 and ZOLTÁN KORSÓS2 1 Department of Geology and Paleontology, Hungarian Natural History Museum, Ludovika tér 2−6, 1083 Budapest, Hungary E−mail: [email protected] 2 Department of Zoology, Hungarian Natural History Museum, Baross u. 13, 1088 Budapest, Hungary ÁLLATTANI KÖZLEMÉNYEK (2007) 92(1): 39–51. Abstract. Systematic position of three Hungarian Pleistocene fossile lion taxa Panthera leo fossilis, P. l. spelaea and P. onca gombaszoegensis (originally Leo gombaszoegensis) were clarified by the cladistic analysis of 71 teeth and skull morphological characters. The two most parsimonious trees, using the computer program Hennig86, showed that Leo gombaszoegensis stands closer to the Jaguar (Panthera onca), also in the ingroup, either at separate specific, or at subspecific (P. o. gomba¬szoegensis) level preferred here. The position of the two Panthera leo subspecies were the same in both trees, i. e. the Cave Lion (P. l. spelaea) has a closer relationship to the recent African Lion than to its previously hypothetized ancestor (P. l. fossilis). This result seems to prove that the expansion of the ancient lions from Africa to Europe was not only a single event, but rather a series of dispersion phases in times of favourable climatic conditions. Keywords: Panthera, cladogram, teeth morphology, Hennig86. Edit: Spoke too soon, found it. But it's not in English. It's attached if anyone wants to go for the translation.
Interesting finding, the other hypothesis is that the Cave lion was descended from an ancient group of the maneless African lion.
At the time when the Asian lion used to split away from the African lion at 100kya, the lion had already developed a maned form, the maneless Cave lion could split much earlier than that. However, this article seems to be quite old which is 2007, and does this study still stand by now? |
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