A natural (to me, at least) question popped into my head the other day when I had the Wizard of Oz meme “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” stuck in my head.
Is there any place in the world today where a person could possibly encounter a wild lion, tiger and bear simultaneously?
A quick Internet search has led me to believe that the only place where this might be possible is the Gir Forest National Park in northwestern India, the only place where the Asiatic lion still exists in the wild.
Now, Wikipedia also says that that the range of the Bengal tiger includes India, and that the range of the Asiatic black bear includes northern India.
So, does anyone know if these other two species can also be found in the Gir Forest, or does someone know of another location where these three species co-exist in the wild?
I checked a couple sites for Gir Forest, and none of them list either Tiger or Sloth Bear as occuring there, so I think the answer to your question is no.
Aside from the Gir, wild Lions today only occur in Africa, where the only bears (in north Africa) were extirpated in the 19th century. So there is no place today that Lions co-occur with bears.
Tigers may co-occur with (I think) at least 3 species of bears (Sloth, Asian Black, and Brown) in Asia, however.
Well, in South America, you’ll find the Spectacled Bear, the Jaguar (genus panthera, similar to to tiger), and the Mountain Lion, though despite its common alias as a panther it is actually a member of genus puma and therefore more closely related to the leopard than a lion.
However, a good slinger of fiction never lets the facts stand in his way; witness Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ian Fleming, and the entire writing staff of Time magazine. So, lions and tigers and bears it must be when one is skipping down the Yellow Brick Road.
Now, about Dorothy stealing those silver slippers off of the dead body of the so-called “Wicked Witch of the East”, just on Glenda’s say-so…that was a con-job of the first order.
Good point, since in many Latin American countries the Jaguar is called tigre, and the Mountain Lion leon. So that while lions and tigers and bears don’t occur together, tigres y leones y osos do. (Jaguars are probably not very common in the highland areas frequented by Spectacled Bears, but they may occur there occasionally. And Pumas do occur in montane areas in South America.)
[A nitpick, however: Since lions and leopards are members of the same genus (Panthera, along with the tiger and jaguar), the Mountain Lion is no more closely related to one than to the other. In fact, the Mountain Lion is more closely related to the Cheetah than to any other big cat.]
A note:
I picked up and read [BThe Annotated Wizard of Oz** a couple of years ago:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393049922/qid=1117570585/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/104-5791173-8011932?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Although I’d read TWoO before, 'd completely forgotten the creatures called “Kalidahs” that are Tiger-Bear combinations. If you mix those with The Cowardly Lion, you get “Lions and Tigers and Bears” (Oh, my!) I believe that the annotations point this out. Maybe this is where the idea for the chant (which isn’t in the book) came from. The 1939 film is the bastard child of many parents, so I don’t recall reading anything else about this part elsewhere.
One observation that I do, personally, make – I’ll bet the Kalidah got their name from the kind of telescope you could, in principle, use to watch out for them.
Ok, were there any places 1000 (or 10,000) years where lions (Panthera leo), tigers (Panthera tigris), and bears (Ursus your-choice) commonly co-existed?
Within the last few 100 years Lions still ranged from Africa all the way through Turkey and Iran to western India (map), and Tigers still occurred in Turkey and Iran as well as India. In western India both could have occurred with the Sloth Bear (Melursus ursinus). Brown Bears (Ursus) as well as Asian Black Bears occur in Iran, so lions, tigers, and bears may have occurred together there as well. However, given that they are found in somewhat different habits it’s not certain they would have occurred in exactly the same place.
10,000 years ago Lions ranged into northern Asia, so it is possible that Tigers and Brown Bears (Ursus) could have co-occurred in some places there as well at that time.
Really? It was my understanding that the cheetah was not a true cat, and that any common ancestor of cheetahs and any true cat would also be a common ancestor to all true cats. Has this recently been rethought, or was I just mistaken?
And elfkin477, don’t forget about the Giant Rats, too.
Cheetahs are highly specialized for running, and so have many distinctive features that have in the past caused scientists to assign them their own subfamily or other category. However, some evidence (including fossil evidence first published at least 25 years ago) suggests that they are in fact derived from a Puma-type stock relatively recently.
Cheetahs belong to family Felidae, like all true cats, but are of genus Acinonyx unlike the other large modern cats, which belong to Panthera save for the cougar or puma, which is in genus Puma. The taxinomy for cats seems to be both erratic and fugacious, and quite at odds with the common nomenclature, (Panthers, for instance, are not in genus Panthera, while leopards are not of genus Leopardus.)
So, cheetahs and the puma/catamount/cougar/(North American) panther are most likely closely related. Large cats, being a “top shelf” predator with only a few prey species, are highly sensitive to changes in climate or ecosystem which affect the behavior or population spread of their prey. They are, basically, the sharks of the continental land masses, highly evolved to a particular niche and have a tendency, when small groups are seperated from the main population, to evolve into a more specialized subspecies and/or evolve themselves right out of existance. (This may already be happening with the cheetah, which apparently has a low amount of genetic variance within population and a high degree of abnormal sperm production. This, in combination with habitat restriction, may make them nonviable in the wild.)
I’m not sure how they would be claimed as a non-feline species, but they are sufficiently distinct, cladistically (with their narrow chest, elongated limbs, and non-retractable claws) to justify a seperate genus, I guess.
Watson did always have a fantastical tendency toward cryptozoology, and was never the most reliable of narrators, as perveyors of The Game are well aware.
I don’t know anything about giant rats, but I do know that the elephants there are pretty intelligent(you know, for elephants). Some people on a nature show tried to get night shots of the tigers a while back, and thought that some of the locals were messing with the cameras since they were trashed every morning. Turns out that it was elephants finding and pulling them out of trees - which they discovered when they viewed the tape of a battered, but not broken, camera and saw what happened. See? They knew that the media was up to no good
