Shrouded in mystery, the first cat on earth burst onto the ‘oligo-scene’, conquered most of the world, and then disappeared without a trace. What made these formidable hunters so successful, and yet so vulnerable to extinction? This is the mother of cats, the proailurus. Today we’re taking a look at the origins of one of the most successful and charismatic carnivoran families, the cats. And our focus is the granddaddy of them all - the first cat in history, the proailurus.
It lived across Eurasia and fossils have been found from the Iberian peninsula to East Asia in the oligocene, about 27 mya. There are some unclassified fossils from North America that seem to be from the same species, but as of today, we have no confirmation that the first cat ever lived in North America. These ancient kitties weighed around 9 kilos, about the size of the largest domestic cat breed, the Maine Coon. But Proailurus looked more like a civet than a modern cat.
Civets are related to cats, and they still have a similar lifestyle to proailurus. This First Cat’s legs were shorter and its tail was longer than those of modern cats. This suggests an arboreal lifestyle. Their body was remarkably similar to the fossa, but this is just a case of convergent evolution.
Despite their cat-like appearance fossas are actually more closely related to mongooses and hyenas than to cats. But convergently evolving a similar body plan for a likely similar lifestyle makes it a little easier to imagine how proailurus might have behaved.
Based on their dentition, we can pretty comfortably say that their diet likely consisted of smaller mammals, as well as birds and lizards, which is very similar to the menus of modern arboreal felines like margays. But the fact that they had a few extra premolar teeth suggests their diet might have included some plant matter.
The oligocene was a time of changing environments and the forests proailurus originated gradually turned into grasslands. Proailrus might have come down from trees and become more adept at hunting on the ground, like modern Salt Cats Unfortunately there are only a handful of fossils and then they basically disappeared from the fossil record for about 10 million years.
Nobody knows exactly why cats became so rare throughout the world -especially in North America. This mysterious period is known as the Cat Gap. Proailurus’ American citizenship is controversial, but there were other closely-related cat-like predators, which all seemingly vanished. The most obvious answer is of course, aliens. No, I'm kidding, well, probably not aliens.. More likely the case is that these predators were specialists, and their prey might have declined due to environmental and ecological factors.
Cats are hypercarnivores and can only subsist on meat. This type of diet makes animals more prone to extinction. A lengthy widespread absence of prey would have been a catastrophe. Around 18 million years ago they started popping up again. Proailurus’ possible descendant, the pseudaelurus, was a genus with at least four different species. They varied in size, with the smallest being the size of a Swamp Catt and the largest was the size of a cougar. These early cats certainly lived in North America, as well as Eurasia, though we don’t know if it was they or their ancestors who made the trek across the Bering land bridge. We’re also not sure if they’re direct descendants of proailurus or of another yet-to-be-discovered species. But we do know that they had retractable claws and were likely great climbers, like most modern cats. We’re still unsure if they liked sitting in boxes and purposely knocking plants off shelves.
These kitty cats were more closely related to the cats that radiated and created species as diverse as sabertooths, lions, and eventually domestic cats. If proailurus is the first cat, pseudaelurus is the closest we have to the most recent common ancestor of all living cats. The mother of cats. The cat family tree is still being put together, so if you’re into finding fossils and helping us classify them, we could surely use the help!
So what should we talk about next? Please let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading this post. See ya!
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