🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This influential comparative study estimated bite forces across a broad range of living and extinct mammalian carnivores using dry-skull dissection methods and lever modelling, then scaled the results…

Wroe, S.; McHenry, C.; Thomason, J. · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2005

This study measured or estimated bite forces across many carnivoran species and related them to body size, skull shape, and feeding ecology, building predictive relationships between morphology and pe…

Christiansen, P.; Wroe, S. · Ecology · 2007

Felids kill primarily with their canine teeth, and this overview reviews how canine form and the killing bite are matched to prey. Many cats deliver a precise nape or throat bite, the slender, sharp c…

The degree of curvature in a claw correlates with how an animal uses it, and this overview reviews that relationship in cats. Strongly recurved claws favour gripping bark and branches and hooking into…

Cats walk on their toes, a digitigrade posture that lengthens the effective limb and changes the geometry of force transmission. This overview reviews how toe-walking affects stride length, speed pote…

Recent research suggests some mammals, possibly including cats, transmit ultraviolet light to the retina, and this overview reviews the evidence and its uncertainty for felids. Studies of ocular media…

The feline commitment to meat is an evolutionary story, and this overview reviews how hypercarnivory and its metabolic specialisations arose in the cat lineage. As cats specialised on vertebrate prey,…

Cats move through a sequence of gaits as speed rises, from a walk to a trot, then to bounding and galloping forms. This overview describes the footfall patterns, duty factors, and energetic and stabil…

Sabertooths such as Smilodon had exceptionally muscular, robust forelimbs, and this overview reviews their inferred role in subduing prey before the bite. Strong, heavily built front limbs would let t…

Sabertoothed cats needed extraordinary jaw gapes to bring their long canines to bear, and this overview reviews how their jaw mechanics achieved this. Estimates place maximum gape far beyond that of a…

The long, blade-like canines of sabertoothed cats were powerful weapons but also potentially fragile, and this overview reviews how they may have been protected from fracture. The favoured solution is…

Driving long canines into prey is thought to have required powerful neck muscles in sabertoothed cats, and this overview reviews the evidence for enhanced head-depression musculature. Enlarged attachm…

Small cats seem to out-jump big cats relative to their size, and this overview reviews how jumping ability scales across the felid family. Physical principles predict that absolute jump height does no…

Felids span from sub-kilogram wildcats to lions and tigers of well over a hundred kilograms, and body size profoundly shapes how they move. This overview reviews how speed, acceleration, jumping abili…

Cat skulls vary in robustness and proportion, and this overview surveys how that variation tracks the size of prey a species typically takes. Cats that tackle relatively large prey tend to have more r…

Although many cats avoid water, some are capable swimmers, and a few hunt in it. This overview surveys aquatic locomotion in felids, focusing on the fishing cat, whose partially webbed paws and water-…

Sabertoothed cats are thought to have killed very differently from living felids, and this overview reviews the leading canine-shear hypothesis in that comparative light. Where modern big cats use a p…

A predator teeth are subjected to repeated high loads, and this overview surveys patterns of tooth fracture and wear in wild felids and what they reveal. Broken canines and worn carnassials accumulate…

The cheetah is the classic exception to feline claw retraction: its claws remain largely exposed, blunt, and dog-like. This overview reviews the functional reasoning that this trades the sharp, sheath…