Bengal Tiger

The tiger of the Indian subcontinent, one of the biggest wild cats and national animal of India and Bangladesh.

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The Bengal tiger is a population of the mainland tiger subspecies Panthera tigris tigris and one of the largest wild cats alive. It ranges across India, southern Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan into southwestern China, and it is the national animal of both India and Bangladesh. As of 2022, surveys counted 3,167–3,682 tigers in India, 316–355 in Nepal, 131 in Bhutan and around 125 in Bangladesh. Poaching, habitat loss and fragmentation remain the main threats to its survival.

Quick Facts

Subspecies: Panthera tigris tigris
Range: India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, southwestern China
Male weight: 200–260 kg / 441–573 lb
National animal of: India and Bangladesh

Facts from the source article.

Background

Carl Linnaeus named the tiger Felis tigris in 1758, and Reginald Innes Pocock moved it into the genus Panthera in 1929. Bengal is the traditional type locality for the species. Since the 2017 revision of cat taxonomy, all tigers of continental Asia, living and extinct, have been grouped under P. t. tigris, with the Bengal tiger in the southern clade. Genetic patterns suggest tigers reached India roughly 12,000 years ago, which fits the absence of older tiger fossils there and the lack of tigers in Sri Lanka, cut off by rising seas in the early Holocene. Its old range once reached the Indus Basin.

Did You Know?

Two males caught in Chitwan National Park in the 1980s topped 270 kg, the largest free-ranging tigers on record.
A male killed in 1967 in the Himalayan foothills weighed 388.7 kg after eating a buffalo calf.
Only one fully authenticated true albino tiger is known.