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Feliform evolutionary timeline. All modern carnivorans, including cats, evolved from miacoids, which existed from approximately 66 to 33 million years ago.There were other earlier cat-like species but Proailurus (meaning "before the cat"; also called "Leman's Dawn Cat"), which appeared about 30 million years ago, is generally considered the first "true cat".
But while the human migration happened only 20,000 years ago and appears to be mostly unidirectional, cats appear to have migrated back and forth as many as 10 times beginning nine million years ...
Originally the Egyptian populations were credited with the early domestication of cats approximately 3,600 years ago but archaeological evidence also disputed the hypothesis in 2004. [2] In 2007, archaeologists working in Cyprus found an even older burial ground, a Neolithic site that is approximately 9,500 years old, of a child buried with a ...
Feliformia is a suborder within the order Carnivora consisting of "cat-like" carnivorans, including cats (large and small), hyenas, mongooses, viverrids, and related taxa. Feliformia stands in contrast to the other suborder of Carnivora, Caniformia consisting of "dog-like" carnivorans (includes Canoidea).
Cat species vary greatly in body and skull sizes, and weights: The largest cat species is the tiger (Panthera tigris), with a head-to-body length of up to 390 cm (150 in), a weight range of at least 65 to 325 kg (143 to 717 lb), and a skull length ranging from 316 to 413 mm (12.4 to 16.3 in).
Pseudaelurus is a prehistoric cat that lived in Europe, Asia and North America in the Miocene between approximately twenty and eight million years ago. It is considered to be a paraphyletic grade ancestral to living felines and pantherines as well as the extinct machairodonts (saber-tooths), and is a successor to Proailurus.
Miacoidea ("small points") is a former paraphyletic superfamily of extinct placental mammals that lived during the Paleocene and Eocene epochs, about 66-33,9 million years ago.
It is a likely ancestor of Pseudaelurus, which lived 20–10 million years ago, and probably gave rise to the major felid lines, including the extinct machairodontines and the extant felines and pantherines, although the phylogeny of the cats is still not precisely known. [14]