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: 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: 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).