🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview examines the remarkable dispersal history of the lion lineage, which spread from an African and Eurasian heartland across the Northern Hemisphere during the Pleistocene. Cave lions, Pant…

This overview focuses on what Paleolithic depictions and frozen specimens suggest about whether male cave lions had manes and how the animals behaved socially. Cave art rarely shows the prominent mane…

This overview surveys the recovery and analysis of complete mitochondrial genomes from cave lion fossils, which have helped pin down the position of Panthera spelaea within the lion radiation. Mitogen…

This overview examines how molecular clocks, calibrated with fossils, have been used to estimate when the living big cats diverged from one another. Genetic studies place the origin of the Panthera li…

This overview surveys the science of permafrost-preserved cave lion remains, an exceptional class of fossils in which freezing has retained skin, fur, muscle, and other soft tissues for tens of thousa…

This overview examines how radiocarbon dating is applied to the bones of late Pleistocene cats to reconstruct their chronologies and last appearances. Directly dating individual fossils of Smilodon, c…

This overview examines how researchers reconstruct the hunting behaviour of the cave lion from anatomy, isotopes, prey associations, and prehistoric art. Skeletal proportions indicate a powerful ambus…

This overview surveys efforts to reconstruct how Panthera atrox looked, including the contentious question of whether males bore a mane like modern African lions. Because the American lion descends fr…

This overview compares the killing strategies of sabertooth cats with those of conical-toothed felids such as modern lions and tigers. Living big cats typically use short, robust canines and a powerfu…

This overview surveys the stable isotope techniques used to reconstruct the diets of extinct cats. Carbon isotopes in bone and tooth collagen and enamel record whether prey fed on plants using differe…

This overview examines the record of Panthera atrox at Rancho La Brea, where the American lion is far less common than the sabertooth Smilodon but is nonetheless represented by valuable cranial and po…

This overview examines the central role of the Bering land bridge in the history of cats, serving as a recurrent corridor for felid movement between Asia and North America. The survey reviews how lowe…

This overview describes a pair of cave lion cubs, often referred to as Uyan and Dina, recovered from Siberian permafrost and among the first such mummified Panthera spelaea young to attract wide scien…

This overview examines the cat gap, a roughly seven-million-year interval in the Oligocene and early Miocene during which true cats are essentially absent from the North American fossil record, even t…

This overview examines the vast geographic range of the cave lion, which spread across northern Eurasia and into Beringia and parts of northwestern North America during the Pleistocene. This enormous…

This overview examines the long-running debate over what the American lion, Panthera atrox, actually was. Since its description from Pleistocene North America, researchers have variously regarded it a…

This overview surveys the fossil record of the jaguar lineage and its spread into the Americas. The jaguar, Panthera onca, traces its origins to Old World pantherines whose descendants crossed into No…

This overview describes two remarkably preserved cave lion cubs, nicknamed Sparta and Boris, recovered from the permafrost of Yakutia in northeastern Siberia. Frozen for tens of thousands of years, th…

This overview takes a deep-time perspective on the rise and fall of sabertooth cats, whose machairodont lineage flourished for more than ten million years before vanishing in the late Pleistocene. Aft…

This overview surveys the internal classification of the Machairodontinae, the true sabertooth cats within the family Felidae. Researchers commonly divide the subfamily into several tribes: the Smilod…

This overview surveys evidence on where and when the Panthera lineage, the genus that includes lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, and snow leopards, first arose. Molecular phylogenies place the diverge…

This overview examines the timing of extinction among the great carnivores of Rancho La Brea, including the sabertooth Smilodon fatalis and the American lion, whose latest dated remains cluster near t…

This overview reviews evidence on when and why the cave lion disappeared, with the latest well-dated records indicating survival into the terminal Pleistocene before extinction roughly fourteen thousa…

Using finite element analysis, the authors built a high-resolution digital model of a Smilodon fatalis skull and compared its mechanical performance against a modern lion. The simulations showed that…

Colin R. McHenry, Stephen Wroe, Philip D. Clausen, Karen Moreno, Eleanor Cunningham · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2007

This study generated genome-scale data from ancient and modern lions, including the extinct cave lion, to reconstruct the deep evolutionary history of the lion lineage. The analyses confirmed that the…

Marc de Manuel, Ross Barnett, Marcela Sandoval-Velasco, Nobuyuki Yamaguchi, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020

This influential study quantified broken teeth among large carnivores from the Rancho La Brea asphalt deposits, including Smilodon fatalis, dire wolves, American lions, and coyotes. Tooth breakage rat…

Blaire Van Valkenburgh, Fritz Hertel · Science · 1993