Description

his is a reproduction of a huge male liger skull that has been cast in durable urethane plastic. A liger is a hybrid of a lion and a tiger, specifically a male lion and a female tiger. The reverse is called a tigon, and I also have a cast of one of those available in my store. Male lions possess special genes that select for large, strong and vigorous offspring, and lionesses have a set of opposing genes that attempt to cancel the male’s genes out (since it is of course the female that must give birth to and feed the young, and it is in her personal interest to not have enormous, hard to feed cubs). Tigers, however, lead an entirely different social lifestyle (or lack of one) and therefore neither gender has any size promoting or reducing genes. So in the case of the liger, the male lion’s genes are expressed unopposed, and a giant that is much larger than either parent is the result. The largest ligers can weigh over a thousand pounds and be 12 feet from nose to tip of tail. I have no idea how large this individual was, but I’m making an educated guess that it was a male due to the size of the teeth and the overall skull size. I would estimate that this liger would have tipped the scales at 800 pounds or more when it was alive. The canines are enormous, the exposed part measuring 3″ in a straight line

This cast measures 16 3/4″ long and 11″ wide, for a total score of 27 3/4″. The only cat with a much larger skull was the extinct American lion, panthera leo atrox (a subspecies of the modern lion, panthera leo), which could score over 30″. P. L atrox was believed to have weighed in at around 900 pounds.

Every detail has been captured in this cast, right down to the texture of the bone and the open nerve and blood vessel holes in the skull. This replica has been cast in two different colors of urethane for added realism – untinted (white) for the teeth and off white for the bone.