Fossil Cats (That Aren't Sabretooths)

Acinonyx pardinensis

The cat family is traditionally divided into two subfamilies: the "purring cats", which are mostly small, and the "roaring cats" which are all medium to large in size. When most people think of fossil species, however, the first ones to pop into their minds are almost certainly the sabretooths, such as Smilodon. These belonged to a third subfamily (and whether they could roar or not depends on fragile bones and soft tissues that haven't survived) that left no modern descendants, dying out towards the end of the Ice Ages.

The sabretooth cats represent an early branch in cat evolution, perhaps splitting off at some point during the Early Miocene, over 20 million years ago. But this means that the cats we are familiar with must have existed - in some form - for equally long, leaving their own fossil history. If you wound back the evolutionary clock on a domestic cat, or even a tiger, you wouldn't find a sabretooth or anything that looked much like one. Exactly what you would find isn't something we can know with certainty, but we do know of a number of fossil species of non-sabretooth cat that at least give us some idea.

Small Cats: Rare Cats of Southeast Asia

Asian golden cat

Wild cats are generally quite elusive species, once we ignore the "big cats" such as tigers and leopards. Some of the small to medium species are nonetheless fairly well-known in the west, including such animals as lynxes and ocelots. But many of them are rather more obscure, tending to be stealthy, nocturnal hunters whose success at feeding themselves often relies on them not being seen. If we combine small size with heavy undergrowth - and, perhaps, not being found in Europe or North America - we are likely to find a few species that are rarely seen at all. 

The forests of Southeast Asia are particularly good place for such creatures to be found, and, in fact, I've already described a number of small cat species that inhabit the region. Those all belong to the "leopard cat" and "domestic cat" evolutionary lineages, but there are a further three species that occupy yet another branch on the cat family tree. Given what I've said above, it shouldn't be surprising that we don't know very much about them.

Small Cats: Servals in the Savannah, Cats in the Congo

Serval

The best-known wild cats living in Africa are, of course, the large ones: lions, leopards, and cheetahs. South of the Sahara, they are joined by two species of small cat: the African wildcat (from which the domestic animal is descended) and the black-footed cat, both of which I have already described in this series. To these, we can add the caracal, a medium-sized cat that closely resembles the lynxes of Eurasia and North America. But, although this was most likely the animal that the word 'lynx' was originally coined to describe, the caracal is not closely related to what we would now regard as the 'true' lynxes. Instead, it is part of a distinctively African lineage of similarly medium-sized cats, containing just two other living species.

The more familiar of the two is surely the serval (Leptailurus serval), an animal that is not only widespread across Africa, but that happens to be relatively easy to breed in zoos. The name apparently derives from an alternative (and now obsolete) Portuguese name for the lynx that has now replaced variants of the older English name of "tiger cat" in most non-African languages. (It's still tierboskat - literally "tiger-forest-cat" - in Afrikaans, and, unsurprisingly, languages such as Swahili had perfectly good words for it already).

Small Cats: Almost a Puma and Not Quite a Lynx

Jaguarundi (grey morph)

As I mentioned at the start of this series, the cat family can be divided into two living subfamilies. The "roaring cats" are all large animals: lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars. The "purring cats", however, are typically much smaller... but there are exceptions. Marginally the largest member of this subfamily is the animal variously known as a puma, cougar, or mountain lion (Puma concolor). These are all the same animal, although the term "puma" is sometimes reserved for the southern subspecies and "cougar" for the northern one(s). They were once found through essentially the whole of the Americas apart from Alaska and central/northern Canada, but, aside from a population of 200 or so "Florida panthers", are now absent from much of eastern North America.

Despite its unusually large size, however, the puma does not represent some early offshoot of the main feline lineage. Indeed, it is more closely related to the domestic cat than it is to, say, the ocelot. The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), the only other "purring cat" that comes close to it in size (the females are roughly similar in weight, but male pumas are larger), turns out to be a fairly close relative, despite the cheetah's remarkable specialisations for speed. The closest relative of the puma, however, is a somewhat less well-known animal: the jaguarundi (Puma yagouaroundi).

Small Cats: Pampas and Mountain Cats

Pampas cat

With the obvious exception of the cheetah, cats are not generally pursuit predators. Rather than chasing their prey over a long distance, they pounce on them from ambush, dispatching them rapidly. As a result, they require habitats with plenty of opportunity for concealment, somewhere that they can hide themselves from potential prey until it's too late. The majority of small cat species are adapted to living in forests, where the bushes and other heavy undergrowth provide a perfect environment for this activity.

After the small cats of the Leopardus lineage first entered South America, it is just such places that most of their descendants ended up living in. This is where we find ocelots and all the other small spotted cats of the continent today. But, with little effective competition from other native predators (there really wasn't anything cat-like on the continent before they got there) it's perhaps unsurprising that some of them did adapt to different, more open habitats, as some of their more distant relatives had elsewhere.

Small Cats: Small Spotted Cats of South America

Oncilla

Cats were, like many other groups of modern mammal, relatively late arrivals to South America. When the continent merged with its northern counterpart, at least four kinds of cat were among the animals that headed south into virgin territory. Three were relatively large (jaguars, pumas, and the now-extinct sabretooths) but, in terms of the number of species surviving today, it was the smallest one that left the most descendants. Finding plenty of space, and few other animals already there that were at all similar, this early cat rapidly diversified into multiple different species.

This ancestral immigrant probably looked something like its best-known descendant, the ocelot. We can say this because most of its other descendants, such as the margay, also look quite a lot like ocelots. Compared with other cats - including those others on the same continent - they are all missing a pair of chromosomes, incorporating the relevant genes elsewhere on their genomes. That karyotypic quirk backs up the physical evidence of the cats' appearances to confirm their close evolutionary relationship.

Small Cats: Ocelots and Margays

Ocelot

Of the seven species of cat identified in the 1758 treatise that marks the dawn of biological taxonomy, just three were what could plausibly be described as "small cats": the domestic/wildcat, the lynx, and the ocelot (Leopardus pardalis). Even today, these three (if we include bobcats in with the lynxes) are probably the best-known kinds of small cat, at least to most people in the West. Having already looked at the others, it's about time I turned to the ocelot.

Originally named as Felis pardalis, the ocelot kept this name up until the late 20th century. At that point, the genus Leopardus was resurrected, having first been used for the ocelot by John Edward Gray in 1842. Gray's original description of the genus doesn't fit at all with what we now know (and was almost completely ignored by everyone else at the time, anyway) but, even by the 1960s, it had become clear that there was a striking difference between the Leopardus cats and every other cat species in the world: they have only 36 chromosomes, instead of 38. This presumably reflects an ancient change in their ancestors, although whether it occurred before or after the proto-ocelots entered South America from the North is impossible to know.

Small Cats: Lynxes of North America

Canada lynx

For much of the 20th century, it was thought that there were only two species of lynx, one of which lived right across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, from Portugal to Newfoundland, by way of Siberia and Alaska. That began to be questioned towards the end of the century, and, since about 2005, it's been pretty much universal to consider this widespread animal to actually comprise three different species. Two of those live in Eurasia, with the other one found only in North America.

This, of course, is the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis); the alternative form of 'Canadian lynx' is also used in some formal sources, but only seems about half as popular. It lives across virtually the whole of Canada south of the tundra but, despite the name, is also found in part of the US. Alaska is the most obvious example here, but Canada lynx can also be found south of the border in the Cascade and Rocky Mountains, around Lake Superior, and in much of Maine. Between 1999 and 2006, a number of Canada lynx were also re-introduced to Colorado, where they had been locally extinct since at least the 1970s; so far, they seem to be doing well enough.

Small Cats: Lynxes of Europe and Asia

Eurasian lynx

Once we get away from the "big cats" as traditionally thought of (lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, and so on) the majority of wild cat species are at least broadly in the size range of the domestic animal. However, there are a few cats that are decidedly medium-sized on this particular scale, of which the best known in the Northern Hemisphere are probably the lynxes.

Lynxes are readily identifiable animals, and the word "lynx" itself dates back to at least the Ancient Greeks. They were also one of the original seven species of cat identified by Linnaeus in 1758 when he created the modern system for scientific naming of animals. As early as 1792, they were split off from the other cats into a subgenus of their own, now considered a full genus. This was in Robert Kerr's translation of Linnaeus' original work into English, by which point, at least four different species of lynx had been scientifically named and described (including one by Kerr himself, in the book in question).

Small Cats: The Manul and the Rusty-Spotted Cat

Manul

The leopard cat and its relatives form one branch in the larger feline family tree, and one that's entirely native to Asia. These live, for the most part, in tropical parts of the continent, often close to plentiful water. But at least one other close relative instead prefers to live in environments that are both much colder and much drier.

Perhaps the most popular name for the animal in English is Pallas's cat (Otocolobus manul), which tends to lead to an argument as to whether there's an 's' after the apostrophe or not. (There usually is, these days, but it's far from universal). For convenience, however, I'm going to use the alternative name of manul, which derives from the original Mongolian name of the animal.

Small Cats: Leopard Cats and Their Kin

Leopard cat
(a northern subspecies)

The jungles of Southeast Asia are home to a particularly large number of cat species. These include tigers, leopards, and clouded leopards, but also a number of smaller species. Of these, the most common are probably the jungle cat, which is a particularly close relative of the domestic animal, and the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) which is slightly less so.

Leopard cats were first identified as a separate species back in 1792, on the basis of animals known to live in Bengal, and some variant of the name "Bengal cat" remains common in a number of non-English languages. That "leopard cat" is often preferred is doubtless due to the fact that the Bengal region is just one part of their much larger total range.

Indeed, leopard cats are known from Kashmir in the west right across to Vietnam and Malaysia in the east, and also through most of the non-mountainous parts of China, reaching into the Russian Far East north of Manchuria. They are one of only two species of wild cat native to Korea (the other being the Eurasian lynx) and they are also found on a number of islands, including Taiwan.

Small Cats: The Domestic Cat's Closest Relatives

Sand cat

The range of species included in the genus Felis has changed significantly over the years. Because of the way such things are named, it includes, by definition, the domestic cat and all its closest relatives - but how close is close?

Unsurprisingly, the genus appears in the very first catalogue of scientific names, all the way back in 1758. At the time, it included every one of the seven species of cat known to the author - wild/domestic cats, lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, lynxes, and ocelots. Over the next few decades, whenever a new cat species was described (as you might imagine, cheetahs and pumas were among the first) it was added to the same genus. At the time, the modern concept of "taxonomic family" didn't exist, and, round about the same time that families became a thing and the Felidae were named, the big cats were hived off into a genus of their own, Panthera.

The Cat Family: Domestic and Wildcats

European wildcat

Perhaps surprisingly, there is some confusion and debate as to the correct scientific name for the familiar domestic moggy. There are, in fact, at least three different possibilities, all of which have their supporters among the people who study such things.

Firstly, there's the option that domestication has had such radical effects on the cat that it can be considered a separate species. In this case, its correct name is Felis catus. That name was first awarded to the animal in 1758, in the oldest listing of scientific animal names still considered valid. At the time, Carl Linnaeus, who wrote the list in question, intended it to apply to both wild and domestic forms, although the domestic version was raised to subspecies status by Johann Erxleben 22 years later.

The Cat Family: Felidae

It is sometimes said, perhaps only half-jokingly, that the growth of the internet has been largely driven by two things: pornography and pictures of cats. I can't do much about the first of those here, but cats are a different matter.

In fact, the reason that I haven't looked at cats so far in my annual surveys of mammal families is precisely because, if there's one group of mammals that has substantial coverage on the internet already, it's cats. Lions, leopards, and so on are also amongst the most popular of subjects for TV wildlife documentaries, and it's hard to see that I have much to add. But, nonetheless, and while I have, of course, covered cats before in individual posts, exploring the family is a gap that I eventually had to fill. So here we go.

Compared with some, more diverse, mammal families, members of the cat family, Felidae, are all readily identifiable as such. Cats have short faces, lacking the long snout of dogs, with large eyes and ears, and prominent whiskers. Their bodies are generally sleek, usually (although not always) with long tails, and they have muscular limbs and sharp claws. Indeed, apart from size and coat colour, most species of cat are remarkably similar in physical appearance. If you removed the skins of a lion and a tiger, only a real expert would have any chance of telling them apart.