Lions may face a challenge to the species’ long reign as king of the jungle, after scientists from Oxford University found that tigers have the bigger brains.
By measuring the skull size and volume of a large sample of tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars, they found that the tiger has a bigger brain than its big-cat cousins. “When we compare the two biggest species, on average the lion has a bigger skull than the tiger based on the greatest length of the skull,” said Dr Nobby Yamaguchi, of Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit. “However, the tiger has bigger cranial volume than the lion. It is truly amazing that tiny female Balinese tiger skulls have cranial volumes as large as those of huge male southern African lion skulls.”
The tiger’s brain is, on average, 16 per cent larger than the lions.
It had previously been assumed that social species such as lions would have larger brains than solitary species like tigers, to cope with the demands of a complex social hierarchy, according to Science Daily.
Yamaguchi said: “Our results strongly suggest that there is no detectable positive relationship between relative brain size and sociality amongst these four big cat species, which shared a common ancestor around 3.7 million years ago.”
The researchers are now planning to investigate what caused the variation in brain size among big cats.
