🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview examines mesowear and other gross tooth-wear approaches as applied to extinct cats, which assess the cumulative shape and rounding of cusps to infer long-term dietary abrasiveness and ca…

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…

A recurring complication in felid systematics is that trees built from mitochondrial DNA often disagree with those from nuclear DNA. This overview explains why: the maternally inherited mitochondrion…

Estimating when cat lineages split underpins much of felid systematics and biogeography. This overview explains how molecular clocks, calibrated with fossils, convert genetic distances into divergence…

The history of cat classification is largely a story of tension and eventual integration between morphological and molecular approaches. This overview compares the two: morphology, including skull mor…

Overall dynamic body acceleration, or ODBA, sums the dynamic component of acceleration across three axes to provide a low-cost proxy for an animal's rate of energy use. This overview explains the rati…

Before estimating a home range, one must verify that the animal actually has one, that its movement is range-resident rather than dispersing, migrating, or nomadic. This overview describes diagnostic…

This overview contrasts two dominant frameworks for analyzing habitat use from telemetry. Resource selection functions compare habitat at used locations with habitat available across some defined regi…

Roads influence felid movement in layered ways, and this overview synthesizes how telemetry reveals them acting simultaneously as sources of mortality, physical and behavioral barriers, and selective…

Home-range estimates depend not only on the animal but on how it was sampled, and this overview examines how the number of fixes and the interval between them shape the result. Too few locations under…

Any device added to an animal carries potential costs, and this overview examines research into the energetic and biomechanical burden of tags, drawing on the broader literature where careful experime…

Battery life is the hard ceiling on tracking duration, so engineers pursue energy harvesting to extend or even indefinitely sustain deployments. This overview covers solar panels integrated into colla…

Initiatives to receive signals from very small animal tags via satellites or the International Space Station, such as the ICARUS effort, promise to shrink trackers and broaden which species can be fol…

Whether a cat population is a species or a subspecies depends heavily on which species concept is used. This overview compares the biological species concept (reproductive isolation), the phylogenetic…

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…

State-space models provide a unified statistical framework that separates the true, unobserved movement process from the noisy observation process that telemetry produces. This overview explains how t…

This concluding overview synthesizes how the study of felid movement has evolved from sparse VHF triangulation to dense, multi-sensor biologging that captures not only where cats go but what they do a…

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…

The IUCN SSC Cat Specialist Group is the authority most responsible for the consensus list of cat species and subspecies. This overview describes its structure, its publication Cat News, and how it co…

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…

The wildlife crossings along the Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park constitute one of the longest-running, most comprehensively monitored road-mitigation programs in the world, and this…

The COVID-19 lockdowns created an unprecedented, sudden reduction in human activity dubbed the anthropause, and this overview examines what it revealed and may yet reveal about how cats respond to hum…

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 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…

Molecular phylogenetics partitions all living cats into eight monophyletic lineages, a framework that now organizes felid taxonomy. This overview names and characterizes them: the Panthera lineage (bi…

Across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, naturalists named dozens of felid subspecies using trinomials, often from a single skin, skull, or locality. This overview traces that era, when type spe…

The perennial tension between lumpers, who favor fewer broad taxa, and splitters, who recognize many fine ones, is sharply visible in cat classification. This overview examines how the debate plays ou…

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 traces how VHF radio-telemetry emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s, when biologists such as the Craighead brothers fitted grizzly bears in Yellowstone with radio collars and proved that…