What Is The Biggest Cat That Ever Existed?
Is it the Liger or the Smilodon?
What is their difference in weight and size?
What is their difference in skills?
How do each compare to the tiger and lion?
And who would win in a fight?
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The largest cats that ever existed were the European cave lion and the American lion, both of which were around 25% larger than modern lions (meaning they stood about 5 feet tall!). Both became extinct around 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age, probably because of the extinction of the megafauna on which they preyed.
There were 3 species of Smilodon – the ancestral S. gracilis, which was quite small, the North American S. fatalis, which was somewhere between the jaguar and lion in size, and the larger South American S. populator, which was about the size of a lion.
The liger is a hybrid, the offspring of a male lion and female tiger (the offspring of a male tiger and female lion is called a tigon). It tends towards gigantism and usually grows larger than either of its parents, and even larger than the Siberian tiger, which is the largest cat living today. However, it still does not get as large as cave lions or American lions, and as a hybrid, the liger is not a species in its own right – it is bred only in captivity for the amusement of human beings, and does not exist in the wild. Like most hybrids, it is usually sterile, though occasionally a female will be fertile.
In a fight between a Smilodon and a liger, my money would be on the Smilodon, despite the liger’s greater size. Smilodon were heavily built and had immensely powerful forelimbs with which to pin down their prey, not to mention their huge canines. They were built to hunt animals much larger than themselves, and would have little trouble taking down a fat, lazy hybrid.
EDIT: King Coxy, you seem to have got all your info from Wikipedia, which is full of sh*t. Anybody can go on there and post anything they like. Some of us have done actual research, studied the animals and fossils ourselves. Ligers are certainly big, but they are not as big as cave lions or American lions were, and even if they were, they are hybrids, not an actual species. Also, I am not a ‘he’, and as to my being an ex-zookeeper, how do you know it’s not because I’m now a zoologist studying cats? Why bother to answer questions if you don’t actually know anything yourself, and just get your answer from Wiki??
Basically pure bred today = Siberian Tiger
Hybrid today = Liger
Because the male lion has a growth gene and so does the female tiger meaning it becomes bigger than both the parents at nearly 10 feet long and 320kg’s!
Smilodon = 50kg upto 300kg
But a liger can reach = 330kg and thats taken from only a few in existence…so really a liger’s bigger…
Biggest ever = Liger!
Oh and its the biggest even bigger than the american cave lion!
Because…
Liger = 10 feet long
American Cave lion = 5 – 8 feet long
And…
Liger = 320 kg’s!
American Cave lion = 300kg’s
I agree with leolupus. And Smilodon would mop the floor with today’s cats. The where extremely powerful predators. Able to take down huge prey. Much larger than anything we see today.