#cat gap

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edits from the article Cat Gap, I page I plan to return to

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Dash art by @precovidian & @girlkoris & @mrsfractal

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Today I learned about the cat gap, a tragic period in history between about 25 million and 18.5 million years ago. It began shortly after the first cats appeared (in Eurasia), and ended around the time when their descendants made it to the New World. For poorly-understood reasons, there are almost no feline fossils dating from this transitional period.

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[nimravid]

Nimravids were saber-toothed cat-like animals of the family Nimravidae. Although not true cats in the Felidae family, Nimravidae are considered to be a sister taxon to felids. They are basal

In North America, the fossil record shows a long period where there were no catlike predators present. After the nimravids died out, nothing resembling a cat graced the continent for millions of years. The catless days in between the nimravids and true cats in North America are known as the "cat gap."

[deltamualpha]

The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. The cause of the "cat gap" is disputed, but may have been caused by changes in the climate (global cooling), changes in the habitat and environmental ecosystem, the increasingly hypercarnivorous trend of the cats (especially the nimravids), volcanic activity, evolutionary changes in dental morphology of the Canidae species present in North America, or possibly even attributed to patterns of periodicity of extinctions (climatic/floral cycles called "van der Hammen cycles")

Cat gap - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia