Side note: By the way, is important to mention that the largest femur found of the Ngandong tiger (P. tigris soloensis) measured 480 cm, which is slightly larger than the largest femur recorded for “Panthera atrox” (460 cm) and “Panthera (leo) fossilis” (475 cm). Christiansen & Adolfssen (2008) present a morphological table that shows that even when a tiger and a lion had similar sized femur, the same tiger is substantially longer in the body and heavier in body mass than the lion in question. This suggests that this great tiger was possibly the true largest cat of all times. I have more data about this, if you need it. Greetings to all.

Conclusion: Interesting as it is, the evolutionary history of the tiger is interesting and based in several re-colonization, not just one simple migration from north to south like is suggested by early studies (Mazák, 1981; Heptner & Sludskii, 1992). Sorry for the long post, but I have literally tons of data about the evolution history of the tiger and I am preparing a paper about the Ngandong tiger from some time ago, but the body mass estimations are the hard part. Hope that Roman can use all this data to.

Third part: The island tigers (Java and Bali) are the last remanent of the giant Ngandong tiger, which already showed the particularly narrow occipital with is characteristic of the Javanese tiger. This suffer from Island dwarfism and by the early Holocene, they were already of the size of an average South China tiger. The Sumatran tiger seems to be an hybrid between the mainland population and the Javanese tigers that repopulated the area. The genetic studies of Cracraft et al. (1998) and Luo et al. (2004), thogether with the morphologycal analysis of Mazák and Groves (2006) and Mazák (2010) support the "species" status of Sumatran tigers (Panthera sumatrae).

Second part: By end of the Pleistocene (75,000 - 106,000 ago), the great Toba eruption destroyed almost all the ecosystem of southern Asia and its species, forming several genetic bottle necks, and according with Luo et al. (2004), the last remnant tiger population that inhabit the north of Indochina, gives origin to all the modern mainland tigers (the South China-North Indochina tiger "Panthera tigris amoyensis" was the first of these new mainland tigers (Luo et al, 2004; Driscoll et al., 2009)). In other words, the large Wanhsien tiger is the direct ancestor of the entire modern mainland "Panthera tigris" (tigris, altaica, virgata, corbetti, amoyensis and jacksoni).

First part: In fact, there was not just "one" tiger in Pleistocene Java. The fossil record show that the first "true" tiger lived in Java during the early-middle Pleistocene and it was the "Panthera tigris trinilensis". However, this relative small tiger invaded mainland, raplicing the primitive China tigers and gives origin to the large Wanhsien tiger ("Panthera tigris acutidens"). Latter by the upper Pleistocene, a second wave from China invaded the Sonda shelf (Sumatra, Java, Bali and Borneo, together), replacing the local tiger population (which in that time, was the "Panthera tigris oxignata"). So, by the final of the Pleistocene, there were two large tiger species, the 250-300 kg Wanhsien tiger ("Panthera tigris acutidens") in mainland (China to Beringia) and the even larger 370-470 kg Ngandong tiger ("Panthera tigris soloensis") from the Sonda shelf (Groves, 1992; Hertler & Volmer, 2007).