Quote:
Originally Posted by Capsicum
And now, for a very different alternate history scenario.
Siberian tigers came close to, but did not cross the Bering land bridge during the last ice age.
According to this book:
"Curiously, the tiger did not follow the great herds across the land bridge called Beringia during the Pleistocene exchange of fauna between Eurasia and North America, possibly because — despite its tolerance of Siberian winters down to — 40°F — it could not hibernate like the brown bear and therefore retreated with the onset of the icebound winter, or because the tiger niche in North America had been partially occupied by other cats, including lynx, mountain lion, cheetah, and "saber-toothed tiger."
However, late Pleistocene fossils identified as tigers have turned up in eastern Beringia, and so, perhaps, it trailed the elk on summer journeys as far as west Alaska but died out before a breeding population became established. No tiger fossils have turned up in the Americas, nor did the tiger spread west into Europe, perhaps because of competition with the closely related lion".
Source: https://books.google.com/books/about...ringia&f=false
What if they did, and Canada ended up having tigers?
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During the late Pleistocene, the Beringian land bridge was dominated by steppe flora and fauna. The largest predators were the cave lion (similar in size to Siberian tigers and thought to live in prides like modern lions); the dirk toothed cat Homotherium (about the size of a modern lion and solitary - no match for a large tiger but adopted for longer distance running to chase down prey on the steppe); the terrifying short faced bear (long distance runner and ultimate scavenger) as well as brown bears and wolves larger on average than modern variants and adopted to hunt megafauna.
Tigers are essentially a forest species, this is really what kept them out as there's never been a continuous band of highly productive forest habitat spanning the land bridge. Even if a thin forest band did span the bridge from time to time during the ice ages, it wasn't productive enough to support tigers. Think of the vast swaths of Siberian boreal, it has no tigers because it cannot support a high enough prey density. A tiger would starve wandering around trying to catch the deer that are few and far between in this vast but relatively poor habitat. They are not wolves which are able to run for hours through heavy snow or supplement their diets with rodents and vegetation.