Trinil tiger

Trinil tiger (Panthera (tigris) trinilensis Dubois, 1908)

 

Order: Carnivora

Family: Felidae

Time period: Early - Middle Pleistocene (about 1.2 million years ago). That was found at the locality of Trinil, Java, Indonesia

Size: 1.9 m in length, 100 cm in height, 150+ kg of weight.

Panthera tigris trinilensis is an extinct and the oldest form of a tiger that lived 1.66 million years ago in Indonesia, particularly in Java and Trinil. According to some zoologists, it could be the ancestor of all known Indonesian subspecies. that was found at the locality of Trinil, Java, Indonesia. The fossil remains are now stored in the Dubois Collection of the National Museum of Natural History in Leiden, the Netherlands. 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. 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.

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.  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.