(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-12-31 18:21

BEIJING - State Forestry Administration investigators found more than 100 suspected footprints of a South China tiger on Friday in Shaanxi Province, where photos of the big cat taken by a farmer have caused a national controversy over their authenticity.

A South China tiger [File photo]

The Beijing Morning Post reported on Monday that Zhang Bin, a local forestry official who accompanied the investigators, said the team also found a skeleton suspected to belong to a young tiger.

"It's like the skeleton of a cat," said Zhang, adding the bones had been sent to Beijing for DNA testing. "But experts said with a length of 50 centimeters, a cat would have grown tooth bones. This skeleton hasn't (teeth), it's like a cub feline."

"The experts said there is a great probability that it belongs to a South China tiger cub."

He said the footprints found in Zhenping County ranged from 12 to 16 cm, with toes. "To my experience in investigating the wild, they are tiger footprints. They belong to more than one tiger."

Zhang said the experts had also developed rubbings of the footprints for further analysis.

In October, a farmer in Zhenping County, in the northern Shaanxi Province, claimed he snapped photos of a tiger in the forest near his home. The provincial forestry bureau later cited experts as verifying it was a South China tiger. The subspecies was believed to have been extinct in the wild for more than three decades.

However, many scientists and Internet users have denounced the pictures as fake. In November, one netizen posted an on-line picture of a tiger from a new year calendar and claimed the two tigers were identical.

Despite this, the provincial forestry department insisted the tiger in the photo existed in Zhenping County. The Beijing-based China Photographers Society, however, confirmed the images were not real.

Last month, the State Forestry Administration dispatched an expert panel to Zhenping to carry out a field investigation. It hoped to find concrete evidence on whether the tiger existed.

   1 2   

   1 2