But aren’t lions pack animals too?
While they hunt socially, lions do so differently than canids. Canids pursue their prey, while lions, like other felids, mostly rely on stealth and ambush.
Hey, me too! Only I was there every year (sometimes two or three times) between 1992 and 2003. For field trips.
Revenant Threshold
Badgers? We don’t need to show you no stinking badgers !!!
Come on - somebody had to say it.
Quite simple really, there aren’t any giant sheep running about that i’m aware of, so to use sheep as an example would have left me with:
?? is to sheep as
?? is to dogs
which is of no help whatsoever in clarifying the question. I used cats not because I see some mystical link between the two but because it was the only species I could think of that bore a resemblance and had such huge differences in size. Makes sense, no?
Maybe you are barking up the wrong tree…I believe the line split. Evolutionarily, I believe the “Giant Dog” is alive and well inUrsus Arctos Horribilis. Easily outweighs the largest feline.
The Largest mamailian land predator we know about, Andrewsarchus mongoliensis*, “looks” like a prehistoric wolf … he actually wasn’t - more a meateating furred land hippo with a narrow snout … but he doesn’t look unlike a canine - so I don’t think there is a reason the phenotype can’t be this big.
**named after his discoverer but the name always makes me laugh like a Jimmyasaurus fighting my pal’s dinosaur the johnnyasaurus in my Mom’s living room *
more
Andrewsarchus has been described as a cross between a wolf and a wild boar, but the most popular reconstruction is similar to a dog or wolf.
It’s a tributary of the Withlacoocheemama River.
I’m not so sure about that last part.
I would say lion/tiger is to housecat as Mastiff/Great Dane is to Chihuahua.
I would assume the OP is talking about average-sized dogs, and to large canids that exist in nature. In any case, a Great Dane isn’t anywhere near the size of a lion.
As I understand it, the Thumbelina story originated from a night of drunken revelry during which it was discovered that Hans Christian Andersen could fit almost entirely into King Richard’s rib cage.
Those must be some weasels! :eek:
Well, DO they have very many cats that come in flavors smaller than your typical housecat? Might be fair enough to use dogs in that size range (I’ve seen many) as the baseline for comparison, just so we have a consistent size comparison.
DON’T! Or I might have to get a yarn going about the Hibernian Dire Marmoset.
There are a number of wild cat species that are substantially smaller than the average domestic cat, including the Kokod or Guigna Felis guigna and Tigrillo F. tigrina, both of Latin America, which get down to about 2 kg, or less than 4.4 pounds. The smallest wild canid is the Fennec Fox Fennecus zerda of North Africa, which can be as small as 1 kg, or 2.2 pounds.
The largest wild felid is the Siberian Tiger, Panthera tigris altaica, which can reach 306 kg (over 670 lb). This may be the largest felid ever to have existed. The largest wild canid is the Gray Wolf Canis lupus, males of which average 40 kg (about 90 lb) in North America, but which can reach 80 kg (about 180 lb). The exinct Dire Wolf was somewhat larger, but not by too much.
Therefore the largest wild canid is about 80 times the size of the smallest, and the largest felid is over 150 times the size of the smallest. The largest wild felid is more than 3.5 times the size of the largest wild canid, and far larger than the largest domestic breed of dog. (In any case, domestic breeds shouldn’t really be considered, since they have nothing to do with why large canids don’t occur in the wild.)
The reasons for the discrepancy have already been given. Most large canids are cursorial pack hunters, and very large size is unnecessary for pack hunters and a may be a disadvantage for cursorial hunters. Packs of large canids can take prey equivalent in size or even larger than those available to large felids, which are primarily ambush hunters.
The niche of large solitary canid-type carnivore is already occupied by bears in most places, so there is little opportunity for canids to evolve into this niche. While extant bears with the exception of the Polar Bear are primarily omnivorous rather than carnivorous, the enormous extinct Short-faced Bear seems to have been an active hunter.
I was looking forward to chiming in that its not the pack hunting per se (the arguement could be made that lions practice a form of pack hunting), but the persistence (or cursorial) hunting that keeps the size down. Unfortunately I am too late, a bunch of faster, smarter people already said as much.
I didn’t read all the responses, but I did want to call out Colibri’s last post. Did you go to college or something? Very interesting information and analysis, you may have me fooled, but it even sounds like the conculsions you came to were your own (as opposed to regurgitated science text).
Speaking of sizes of cats and dogs (not sure if this counts as a hijack)… I wonder if there is a concentration of small (domestic cat size) and large (say, cheetah on up) Felids (Felorum?) species, as opposed to medium (bobcat size).
If there is a dearth of medium sized cats (this is my impression), is it related to competition (maybe from canids? the prey doesn’t overlap so well, but wolves will eat lemmings, etc.) or if is informed by the most common cat hunting behavior (solitaryish).
If that is the case, then is the hunting behavior informed by the size of the prey that is most effectively caught by the solitary hunting strategy? Or is it a matter of small size prey gets small size hunter, and medium to large prey all get large hunter?
Slight hijack, humans are also cursorial hunters, which may be why humans are neither giants (and never were regardless of legends), nor particularly strong (relative to say, the smaller chimp).
I seem to recall reading on these forums about one of our ancestors that ‘stood’ 8-9 feet tall and weighed 800-900lbs. I can’t remember if it was someone debunking the idea that such a creature existed or stating that it did but it sounds pretty unlikely to me thinking about it now.
It was dubunked. It’s a made up species (supposedly a sub-species of Homo erectus) promoted by Bigfoot enthusiasts.
Thank you. I’m a professional biologist (Ph.D.). More importantly, I am official SD Curator of Critters..
I would say there’s a continuum. There’s plenty of medium-sized cats, including the Bobcat, Lynx, Caracal, Ocelot, Serval, Andean Cat, African and Asian Golden Cats, and Clouded Leopard.
There’s some correlation, but it’s not strict. For example, in the tropics Jaguars tend to take peccaries and Puma take deer, even though Jaguars are larger than Puma and peccaries are smaller than most deer. But Jaguars are quite capable of taking Tapirs, too.
You may be thinking of Gigantopithecus, which did actually exist and may have reached up to 500 kg/1000 pounds. But it was not a human ancestor. Bigfoot enthusiasts tend to promote it as a possible Sasquatch ancestor.
No, the claim was made in this forum. I remember-- I was the one who debunked it. It wasn’t Gigantopithicus, but a subspecies of Homo erectus. I just did a quick search to find that old thread (had to be at least 2 years ago), but couldn’t find it. Look at “extreme claims” under [url=]Meganthropus-- that’s the closest I was able to get to the wikipedia page (which may have been removed).