Pliocene (Pt 9): Coyotes, Cats, and Spectacled Bears

A modern spectacled bear

When it comes to the extinct mammalian predators of North America, few are more famous than the sabretooth cat Smilodon, with the dire wolf likely coming a close second. But both of these animals lived during the Ice Ages, and, of course, with all those tasty horses, deer, and so forth wandering the steppe-lands of Pliocene North America, there were plenty of carnivores there before the Ice Ages began. Indeed, scary though Smilodon undoubtedly was, unless you're the kind of person that enjoys wrestling hungry tigers in the modern world, many of these others were probably quite dangerous enough.

But not, it has to be said, all of them - at least, from a human perspective. There were, as you might expect, many small carnivores in North America at the time, including badgers, weasels, skunks, raccoons and early wolverines and otters. While we can't know the details of their coat colours, it's quite likely that many of these creatures would have looked not too different from their modern relatives and possibly would have been hard to tell apart from them on casual inspection.

The Dog Family: Coyotes and Red Wolves

Coyote

Grey wolves are found across the Northern Hemisphere, but they originated in Asia, only reaching the Americas via the Bering land bridge when sea levels were low. Most of their close relatives are also found in the Old World, but there are one or two very closely related species in North America. Of these, by far the more common and better known is the coyote (Canis latrans).

Coyotes first evolved, in North America, during, or shortly before, the Ice Ages, almost certainly from the now-extinct Pliocene species Canis lepophagus. Today, they are found throughout almost the whole of North America, from Alaska to Panama, being absent only from eastern Canada, the Caribbean coast of Central America, and a number of islands. In this respect, they have actually benefited from the presence of humans; before the arrival of Europeans, coyotes did not live anywhere along the east coast of America, and only moved in once we started chopping trees down to make way for cities and farmland.