🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview reviews the quantitative methods palaeontologists use to estimate the body mass of extinct cats such as Smilodon, Homotherium, and Panthera atrox. Because soft tissue is not preserved, r…

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 examines how the neck and skull anatomy of Smilodon and other sabertooths reveal the mechanics of the killing bite. Because the jaw muscles alone produced a comparatively weak bite, much…

This overview surveys the abundant evidence of disease, injury, and skeletal abnormality preserved in Smilodon fatalis from Rancho La Brea. The asphalt deposits yield bones showing healed fractures, a…

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 the idea that dietary and predatory specialization made many extinct big cats especially vulnerable to extinction. Hypercarnivorous predators such as sabertooths, with anatomy f…

This overview surveys efforts to date the Rancho La Brea deposits and place their sabertooth fossils in time. Because the asphalt pits accumulated remains over tens of thousands of years and because p…

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 explains the long-recognized morphological divide among sabertooth cats between scimitar-toothed forms, such as Homotherium, and dirk-toothed forms, such as Smilodon and Megantereon. Sci…

This overview surveys studies of the fine structure of sabertooth canines, focusing on the serrations, or denticles, along their cutting edges and the internal histology of the teeth. Dirk-toothed cat…

This overview examines whether Smilodon fatalis showed pronounced size differences between males and females, a question with implications for its social system. Because the La Brea sample is large, r…

This overview surveys the cranial features of Miracinonyx that parallel those of the living cheetah, particularly modifications associated with high-speed running. Like Acinonyx, the more cursorial Mi…

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 explains why the Rancho La Brea asphalt seeps preserve such an extraordinary concentration of sabertooths and other carnivores. Natural petroleum seeping to the surface forms sticky asph…

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 surveys evidence that the family Felidae originated in Eurasia, likely in Asia, before dispersing repeatedly across the world. Combining the fossil record of early cats such as Proailuru…

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 the Cerro Batallones fossil sites in central Spain, a cluster of late Miocene deposits remarkable for their unusually high proportion of carnivores, including the sabertooths M…

This overview surveys the Pseudaelurus-grade cats, a diverse assemblage of stem felids that flourished across Eurasia and North America during the Miocene and bridged the dawn cat Proailurus and the l…

This overview examines the hypothesis that the Tibetan Plateau and surrounding high-altitude Central Asia served as a cradle for the evolution of big cats and other cold-adapted carnivores. The discov…

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 vertebral column and trunk anatomy of machairodont cats and how they contributed to predation. The neck vertebrae of sabertooths are often elongated and bear large attachmen…

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 how and when true cats first reached North America, ending the long cat gap. The earliest felids evolved in the Old World, and their descendants crossed the Bering land bridge du…