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Concept
Javan tiger
Summary
The Javan tiger was a Panthera tigris sondaica population native to the Indonesian island of Java until the mid-1970s. It was hunted to extinction, and its natural habitat converted for agricultural land use and infrastructure. It was one of the three tiger populations in the Sunda Islands.
Formerly, it was regarded as a distinct tiger subspecies, which had been assessed as extinct on the IUCN Red List in 2008. In 2017, felid taxonomy was revised and the Javan tiger subordinated to P. t. sondaica along with the Sumatran tiger and the Bali tiger.
Results of mitochondrial DNA analysis of 23 tiger samples from museum collections indicate that tigers colonized the Sunda Islands during the last glacial period 110,000–12,000 years ago.
Felis tigris sondaicus was proposed by Coenraad Jacob Temminck in 1844 as a scientific name for the Javan tiger.
In 1929, the British taxonomist Reginald Innes Pocock subordinated the tiger under the genus Panthera using the scientific name Panthera tigris.
In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the Cat Specialist Group revised felid taxonomy and now recognizes the living and extinct tiger populations in Indonesia as P. t. sondaica.
The Javan tiger was small compared to other subspecies of the Asian mainland, but larger than the Bali tiger, and similar in size to the Sumatran tiger. It usually had long and thin stripes, which were slightly more numerous than those of the Sumatran tiger. Its nose was long and narrow, occipital plane remarkably narrow and carnassials relatively long. Based on these cranial differences, the Javan tiger was proposed to be assigned to a distinct species, with the taxonomic name Panthera sondaica.
Males had a mean body length of and weighed between . Females were smaller than males and weighed between .
The smaller body size of the Javan tiger is attributed to Bergmann’s rule and the size of the available prey species in Java, which are smaller than the deer and bovid species on the Asian mainland. However, the diameter of its tracks are larger than those of Bengal tiger in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal.
Official source
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