Rare golden tiger cub looks extremely cute!

5 years ago
17K

This two-month-old Golden Bengal Tiger might be little, but she's got quite the personality! On this warm Summer day, she found herself a nice hole in the sand to cool down and observe the world around her from the shade. Every baby animal is cute, and cats in particular, so it's no surprise that she looks absolutely adorable, and one could spend hours just looking at her… I mean, just look at that face!

Did you know that, even though that are quite a few "types" of tigers, they all belong to the species, Panthera tigris? Nine subspecies were confirmed based on distinctive molecular markers: Amur/Siberian (Panthera tigris altaica), Northern Indochinese (Panthera tigris corbetti), Malayan (Panthera tigris jacksoni), Sumatran (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Bengal (Panthera tigris tigris) and South China Tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis) still exist, and Bali (Panthera tigris balica), Javan (Panthera tigris sondaica) and Caspian Tiger (Panthera tigris virgate) are now extinct.

The Bengal Tiger usually have the classic orange "tiger look", but recessive genes can change color mutations, like the white Bengal tiger and the golden Bengal tiger, as seen in this video. So in spite of being different colors, they are all Bengal Tigers (Panthera tigris tigris). Golden tigers, however, tend to be larger and have a softer fur.

Tigers are native to Asia, and can currently be found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Russia, and Thailand, even though they used to occur in many other countries. They occur mainly in the forests of tropical Asia, although historically they used to be found in drier and colder climes.

Tigers are solitary and territorial animals. A male's territory will usually overlap with the territories of three females, but females' rarely overlap with each other.

After a century of decline, the numbers of individuals in the wild is finally starting to increase, but the species is still listed as endangered species, being at risk of extinction.

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