Research overview: the rapid pace of the modern felid radiation

The modern cats diversified into roughly forty species within the last eleven million years, a relatively rapid radiation that left a tangled phylogeny marked by short internal branches. This overview surveys the evidence for and consequences of this rapid diversification, including widespread incomplete lineage sorting, introgression, and the difficulty of resolving the order of early splits. It discusses the ecological and geographic factors that may have fueled the radiation, such as the spread of grasslands and new dispersal opportunities, and how recognizing the radiation's speed explains why genome-scale data were needed to untangle relationships that classical methods could not resolve.