🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This landmark supertree assembled disparate published phylogenies into the first complete species-level tree of the carnivores, including all then-recognized cats. It pioneered the supertree method fo…

Bininda-Emonds ORP, Gittleman JL, Purvis A · Biological Reviews · 1999

Nathan and colleagues proposed a unifying framework that organizes the study of all organismal movement around four components: the internal state that motivates movement, the navigation capacity that…

Ran Nathan, Wayne M. Getz, Eloy Revilla, Marcel Holyoak, Ronen Kadmon, David Saltz, Peter E. Smouse · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2008

Cochran and Lord described one of the first practical VHF radio-tracking systems built for free-ranging wildlife, pairing miniaturized transmitters with directional receiving antennas to fix animal po…

William W. Cochran, Rexford D. Lord Jr. · The Journal of Wildlife Management · 1963

The landmark synthesis that re-anchored modern felid taxonomy. A 16-member IUCN Cat Specialist Group task force reviewed morphological, molecular, biogeographic, and behavioral evidence across all liv…

Kitchener AC, Breitenmoser-Wursten C, Eizirik E, et al. · Cat News Special Issue 11 · 2017

This study built a comprehensive, dated phylogeny of the order Carnivora, placing the Felidae within the broader carnivoran tree and providing divergence times for cats relative to their relatives. By…

Nyakatura K, Bininda-Emonds ORP · BMC Biology · 2012

Horne and colleagues introduced the Brownian bridge movement model to home-range and movement analysis, explicitly incorporating the time order of locations and the uncertainty of an animal's path bet…

Jon S. Horne, Edward O. Garton, Stephen M. Krone, Jesse S. Lewis · Ecology · 2007

This introductory review framed a special issue on GPS telemetry, arguing that cheap, dense location data had created both unprecedented opportunity and serious analytical risk for movement ecology. T…

Francesca Cagnacci, Luigi Boitani, Roger A. Powell, Mark S. Boyce · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · 2010

Thurfjell, Ciuti, and Boyce reviewed the rapidly expanding use of step-selection functions, which model habitat selection by comparing each realized movement step with a set of available alternative s…

Henrik Thurfjell, Simone Ciuti, Mark S. Boyce · Movement Ecology · 2014

Tucker and a global consortium exploited the COVID-19 lockdowns, the so-called anthropause, as a natural experiment, comparing GPS movement of many terrestrial mammal species during strict lockdowns w…

Marlee A. Tucker and colleagues · Science · 2023

This study compiled and compared estimated bite forces across many large carnivorous mammals, both living and extinct, to test how bite mechanics relate to predatory behaviour and to predict the habit…

Stephen Wroe, Colin McHenry, Jeffrey Thomason · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2005

Hebblewhite and Haydon offered a candid appraisal of whether the flood of GPS telemetry data had actually advanced ecological understanding or merely generated description. They reviewed how technolog…

Mark Hebblewhite, Daniel T. Haydon · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B · 2010

This study quantified variation in skull and lower-jaw shape across living and extinct cats to understand the patterns and constraints governing felid cranial evolution. Using morphometric analysis of…

Per Christiansen · PLoS ONE · 2008

Clevenger and Waltho analyzed how the design and placement of wildlife underpasses beneath the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park affected their use by different species, drawing on one of th…

Anthony P. Clevenger, Nigel Waltho · Conservation Biology · 2000

The carnivore volume of this reference series provides one of the most comprehensive modern species-by-species treatments of the cat family, with detailed accounts of distribution, taxonomy, and natur…

Wilson DE, Mittermeier RA (eds) · Handbook of the Mammals of the World, Vol. 1: Carnivores · 2009

Before the 2017 task force, the most widely cited global checklist of mammal taxonomy was Mammal Species of the World, whose carnivore section codified the accepted list of cat species and subspecies.…

Wozencraft WC (Wilson DE, Reeder DM eds) · Mammal Species of the World, 3rd ed. · 2005

Avgar and colleagues developed integrated step selection analysis, which simultaneously estimates habitat selection and the animal's underlying movement kernel, the distribution of step lengths and tu…

Tal Avgar, Jonathan R. Potts, Mark A. Lewis, Mark S. Boyce · Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2016

Worton introduced kernel density estimation to home-range analysis, providing a way to estimate the utilization distribution, a probability surface describing how intensively an animal uses each part…

Bruce J. Worton · Ecology · 1989

This study used geometric morphometrics to chart how skull shape evolved across sabertooth cats and their conical-toothed relatives. By quantifying cranial landmarks in many felid species, the authors…

Graham J. Slater, Blaire Van Valkenburgh · Paleobiology · 2008

Tucker and a large international consortium pooled GPS tracking data from many terrestrial mammal species to test whether human footprint constrains animal movement, finding that mammals in areas of h…

Marlee A. Tucker and colleagues · Science · 2018

This review synthesized how tri-axial accelerometers had become a workhorse for inferring behavior in animals that are difficult or impossible to watch directly, including cryptic and nocturnal carniv…

Danielle D. Brown, Roland Kays, Martin Wikelski, Rory Wilson, A. Peter Klimley · Animal Biotelemetry · 2013

This study examined sex-chromosome DNA sequences to estimate the timing and pattern of diversification across the cat family. By comparing X- and Y-linked markers, which evolve at different rates and…

Pecon-Slattery J, O'Brien SJ · Genetics · 1998

This systematic study examined the North American species long grouped under Pseudaelurus, the assemblage of stem cats that bridged the earliest felids and the later radiation of modern cats and saber…

Tom Rothwell · American Museum Novitates · 2003

This study used genome-scale data to reconstruct felid relationships and uncovered widespread evidence that hybridization shaped cat evolution. By comparing many independent genomic regions, the autho…

Li G, Davis BW, Eizirik E, Murphy WJ · Genome Research · 2016

This authoritative review chapter synthesizes the evolutionary history and phylogeny of the cat family, integrating fossil evidence with molecular data to present a comprehensive picture of how cats d…

Lars Werdelin, Nobuyuki Yamaguchi, Warren E. Johnson, Stephen J. O'Brien · Biology and Conservation of Wild Felids (Oxford University Press) · 2010

This analysis combined available morphological and molecular characters to estimate a phylogeny for the cat family and to discuss patterns of speciation. Conducted before the genomic era, it represent…

Mattern MY, McLennan DA · Cladistics · 2000

This paper introduced the daily diary concept, a multi-sensor logger recording tri-axial acceleration, magnetometry, and environmental variables at high frequency to reconstruct an animal's behavior a…

Rory P. Wilson, Emily L. C. Shepard, Nikolai Liebsch · Endangered Species Research · 2008

Raw telemetry data contain implausible points, fixes computed from too few satellites, signal multipath, or transmission glitches, that can corrupt analyses if left in. This overview surveys screening…

This overview surveys Hyperailurictis, the name applied to the North American Pseudaelurus-grade cats that represent the first true felids to colonize the continent after the cat gap. Arriving from Eu…

As tracking generated ever-larger datasets, shared infrastructure became essential, and this overview describes how repositories such as Movebank let researchers store, manage, and selectively share a…

This overview examines Proailurus, widely regarded as the earliest true cat, known principally from the late Oligocene and early Miocene of Europe, including the famous Quercy fissure fillings of Fran…