IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Guggisberg, C.A.W. | |
| Tiger _Panthera tigris_ (Linnaeus 1758) | |
| 1975 Book Chapter | |
Characteristics, distribution and habits of the tiger. The tiger is a magnificent creature. It once played the part of the "King of Beasts" in Korea, but Europeans, instead of making it a symbol of untamed beauty, came to identify the tiger with cruelty and treachery. "A violent, grim, angry, ferocious animal is the tiger," wrote Conrad Gesner, the sixteenth-century naturalist. After the disintegration of the Roman Empire, no tigers were seen in Europe for a very long time, and the memory of the species faded away so completely that Marco Polo was greatly puzzled by the "lions" he saw at the court of Kublai Khan. As a species, the tiger seems to have originated in eastern and perhaps northern Siberia, where skeletal remains have been found on the New Siberian Islands, now well within the Arctic Circle. From this center of Origin, tigers migrated south through China and Siam into Malaya, southwest through Assam into India and west through Central Asia to the Caspian Sea and Transcaucasia. They arrived at Cape Comorin after the land-bridge between Indian and Ceylon had disappeared and were never able to cross the Palk Strait. From Malaya, however, they spread to Sumatra, Java, and Bali, though not to Borneo. The skulls of tiger and lion are very similar, and no two authorities seem to be able to agree fully on how to differentiate between the two without going into highly sophisticated osteological and dental comparisons, such as have been published by Th. Halternorth and J. Kabitzsch. In a general way, it can be said that the tiger's skull is massive and heavy, more vaulted and thus more catlike than the lion's, with the facial part shorter and more convex. The zygomatic arches are excessively wide and strong, the sagittal crest is present, though generally lower than the lion's. Vratislav Mazak, however, describes it as more massive and broader. There obviously is so much variation within each of the two species that many of the characteristics tend to overlap. The basis line of the lower jaw is nearly straight. The first upper premolar may occasionally be absent as is the single upper molar. |
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