The Javan tiger
PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
The tiger of Java was under species of tiger which one originally found on the Indonesian island of Java. From an aspect rather similar to the tiger of Sumatra, it differed from this one by its more obscure peeling and from the finer, abundant and tight black lines.
Some specimens of this subspecies managed to have more than 100 stripes, which was more than any other species of tiger.
The hair of the cheeks of the tiger of Java was longer and the lines of the sides and the back were distributed per pairs.
DISCOVERED
Fossils of primitive tigers were discovered on Java (panthera tigris trinilensis) going back to 1.2 million years, but the tigers such as we know them did not go down from those. They arrived on the island at the end of pleistocene.
REMAINS
Hungarian National Museum of Natural History* has 2 skins of tiger of Java, with 1 skeleton and 10 skulls. One of the skins is particularly interesting for the strange stripe which covers its sides. On this zone, the bands are reduced to a point such as they became invisible, and some are straightforwardly absent. This specimen came from the west of Java and was obtained with the beginning of the year 1800 by 3 Dutch zoologists come to discover the area: Heinrich Kuhl, Johan Christiaan van Hasselt, Gerrit van Raalten.
The second skin of tiger is an adult of male sex. It was imported alive of the island of Java in 1920 and died in the zoo of Rotterdam in February 1931. During the war, the Germans bombarded this zoo and a great number of the dead animals. One is unaware of always the true cause of the extinction of this felid in the zoos, but there remains probable that the structures of the time were hardly equipped to accommodate the animal species which would die generally too quickly.
=> Gallery of Panthera tigris sondaica<=
