Mosbach lion
| Mosbach lion | ||||||||||||
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Radius of the Mosbacher Lion |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| lower and middle Pleistocene | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Panthera fossilis | ||||||||||||
| Reichenau , 1906 |
The Mosbacher lion ( Panthera fossilis , partly also Panthera leo fossilis ) is an extinct big cat of the early and middle Pleistocene . The name was given based on fossil finds in Mosbach , near Wiesbaden. The first to describe it was the paleontologist and naturalist Wilhelm von Reichenau (1906). Numerous remains of the Mosbach lion, such as jaw parts or teeth, are now in the storeroom of the Natural History Museum in Mainz and in the Museum Wiesbaden .
Appearance
With a head-torso length of up to 2.40 meters, the Mosbacher lions were about half a meter longer than the lions found in Africa today and thus almost reached the dimensions of the American lion . Both are roughly the same size as a liger that results from the crossing of a male lion with a female tiger .
Geographical and temporal distribution
Most of the finds of this big cat come from the Mosbacher Sands . This reference named after the former village Mosbach between Wiesbaden and Biebrich, which in 1926 together with Wiesbaden-Biebrich in Wiesbaden was incorporated. However, only fragments of skulls and lower jaws, teeth and other bone fragments were found here. At Mauer , near Heidelberg, an almost complete upper skull was found around 1885, which is now in the Mauer Prehistory Museum. The skull was described by Adolf Wurm in 1912 . The 600,000 year old lower jaw of Mauer , to which Homo heidelbergensis is assigned, was found in the same sediment . The oldest finds of Panthera fossilis in Europe come from Pakefield in England and from Isernia la Pineta in Italy, both sites are between 700,000 and 600,000 years old. A 1.75 million year old lion mandible from the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya shows a striking resemblance to the Mosbacher lions.
The cave lion ( Panthera spelaea ) developed from the Mosbach lion, and appeared for the first time around 300,000 years ago.
literature
- Alan Turner: The big cats and their fossil relatives. An illustrated guide to their evolution and natural history. Columbia University Press, New York NY 1997, ISBN 0-231-10229-1 .
- Joachim Burger, Wilfried Rosendahl, Odile Loreille, Helmut Hemmer, Torsten Eriksson, Anders Götherström, Jennifer Hiller, Matthew J. Collins, Timothy Wess, Kurt W. Alta: Molecular phylogeny of the extinct cave lion Panthera leo spelea. In: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. 30, 2004, ISSN 1055-7903 , pp. 841-849, online (PDF; 196 kB) .
- Ernst Probst : The Mosbach Lion. The huge big cat from Wiesbaden. GRIN Verlag, Munich 2010. ISBN 978-3-640-62372-3 .
- Wilhelm von Reichenau : Contributions to a closer knowledge of the carnivores from the sands of Mauer and Mosbach . In: Treatises of the Großherzoglich Hessische Landesanstalt zu Darmstadt, Volume IV, Issue 2, Darmstadt 1906
Individual evidence
- ↑ Martin Sabol: Panthera fossilis (Reichenau, 1906) (Felidae, Carnivora) from Za Hájovnou Cave (Moravia, the Czech Republic): a fossil record from 1987 - 2007. Sborník Národního musea v Praze 70 (1), 2014, p. 59-70