Panthera tigris trinilensis

Panthera tigris trinilensis, known as the Trinil tiger, is an extinct tiger subspecies dating from about 1.2 million years ago that was found at the locality of Trinil, Java, Indonesia.[1] The fossil remains are now stored in the Dubois Collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands. Although these fossils have been found on Java, the Trinil tiger is probably not a direct ancestor of the Javan tiger. The Trinil tiger probably became extinct 50,000 years ago. The Bali tiger was also not closely related to the Trinil because of their time differences.[2]

Panthera tigris trinilensis
Temporal range: Pleistocene
↓
A fossil found, thought to be of a Trinil tiger
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Suborder: Feliformia
Family: Felidae
Subfamily: Pantherinae
Genus: Panthera
Species:
P. tigris
Subspecies:
†P. t. trinilensis
Trinomial name
Panthera tigris trinilensis
Dubois, 1908

It was the oldest form of a tiger that lived 1.66 million years ago in Indonesia, particularly in Java and Trinil, although according to some zoologists, it could be the ancestor of all known Indonesian subspecies. Perhaps, East Asia was a center of the origin of Pantherinae. The oldest tiger fossils found in the Early Pleistocene Javanese show that about two million years ago, tigers were already quite common in East Asia. However, the glacial and interglacial climatic variations and other geological events may have caused repeated geographic changes in the area.[3][4]

Taxonomy

Much research has been done but there is not much knowledge about this subspecies. Scientists have discovered a fossil that is believed to belong to the Trinil tiger. However, there were doubts that the fossil could belong to the Trinil tiger because it was too big to belong to it. But now it is thought that it might have been a bit smaller than the Bengal tigers and similar to the Indochinese tiger's size.[2] Food competition among large carnivores is a major incentive to increase body weight, so that this Pleistocene subspecies's weight was slightly less than today's Bengal tigers and weighed about 150 kg.

See also

Notes and references

References
  1. Brongersma, Leo (1937). "Notes on fossil and prehistoric remains of "Felidae" from Java and Sumatra". Comptes Rendus du XIIe Congrès Internacional de Zoologie (Lisboa, 1935): 1855–1865.
  2. Eugène Dubois (1908). "Das geologische Alter der Kendengoder Trinil-Fauna". Tijdschrift van het Koninklijke Nedeerlandsch Aardrijkskundig Genootschap. 2 Series 24: 1235–1271.
  3. Leo Daniel Brongersma (1935). "Notes on some recent and fossil cats, chiefly from the Malay Archipelago". Zoologische Mededelingen. 18: 1–89.
  4. Helmut Hemmer (1971). "Fossil mammals of Java. II. Zur Fossilgeschichte des Tigers (Panthera tigris (L.)) in Java". Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Ser. B. 74 (1): 35–52.


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