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Published: 2023-11-30 19:44:43 +0000 UTC; Views: 1845; Favourites: 4; Downloads: 1
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Description
The phylogenetic tree of the "small cats", or rather the "non-roaring cats" as they maybe should be known. I challenge anyone to refer to a cougar or a cheetah as "small". Caracals, servals & lynxes can be the size of a decently sized dog. Felinae, like their "big brothers" the Pantherinae diversified in the late Miocene with a particularly poor fossil record until the Pliocene. Thank God for molecular analysis or else we'd never have figured them out. Seeing as how there were far more species here than with the Pantherinae, this tree required a lot more looking around and researching what the literature actually says about the taxonomy of these animals and I'm really proud of how this turned out. This tree is based on:Kurtén, 1968 (www.semanticscholar.org/paper/… )
Bjork, 1970 (www.jstor.org/stable/1006119?s… )
Werdelin, 1981 (catsg.org/iberianlynx/04_libra… )
Yamaguchi, 2004 (www.filogenetica.org/cursos/de… )
Pecon-Slattery, 2006 (zenodo.org/records/1230866 )
Driscoll, 2007 (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic… )
Werdelin, 2010 (www.researchgate.net/publicati… )
Piras, 2013 (academic.oup.com/sysbio/articl… )
Cherin, 2014 (www.sciencedirect.com/science/… )
Ghezzo, 2015 (repositorioslatinoamericanos.u… )
Li, 2016 (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic… )
Kitchener, 2017 (repository.si.edu/bitstream/ha… )
Nascimento, 2017 (www.revistas.usp.br/paz/articl… )
Piras, 2018 (www.sciencedirect.com/science/… )
Bellani, 2019 (books.google.com/books?id=xK2w… , books.google.com/books?id=xK2w… )
Nascimento, 2020 (academic.oup.com/zoolinnean/ar… )
Trindade, 2021 (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic… )
Jianzuo, 2022 (academic.oup.com/biolinnean/ar… )
Hemmer, 2022 (link.springer.com/article/10.1… )
With some inferences made by me
Some comments:
Pristifelis has historically been considered to be a basal member of the genus Felis, however Bellani (2019) writes that it instead seems to be ancestral to many genera of Felinae. I'm not sure whether that's meant to mean Felinae sensu stricto or Felinae sensu lato however, with Felinae sensu lato meaning Felidae+Pantherinae, excluding Machairodontinae. Piras (2018) found it to be more basal than the Felinae-Pantherinae split. Due to its historical relationship with Felis, I've placed it as the basalmost feline but that is very much subject to change.
Another basal and putatively feline cat, Pratifelis martini, was excluded from the tree as Piras (2018) found it to be nested within Nimravides, making it a Machairodontine.
The genus Leopardus is insanely diverse and probably right in the middle of an evolutionary radiation with both the historic species of the oncilla (Leopardus tigrinus) & the pampas cat (Leopardus colocola) having been found to be species complexes containing at least three and five species species respectively.
The early history of Lynx is a bit unclear. Crown-group lynx seem fairly well-known with the exception of Lynx thomasi which I couldn't find any phylogenetic data on. The species that are usually called "Felis" rexroadensis & "Puma" lacustris were found by Bjork (1970) to probably be closer to Lynx than to Felis & Puma respectively. So Lynx seems to have originated in North America and only later diversified into Eurasia ans maybe also Africa with Lynx thomasi depending on where it turns out to fit in the tree. Speaking of Lynx, I've put Lynx spelaeus as a distinct species sister to Lynx pardinus, but they might be synonymous.
Acinonyx/Puma-grade cats seem even worse. Acording to Bellani (2019), Acinonyx was the first lineage to branch off which is all well and good, but Acinonyx pardinensis might be a macro-species containing all the species A. aicha, A. intermedius and the genus Sivapanthera. I was tempted to code Sivapanthera as a distinct genus or perhaps as Acinonyx-species but I coudn't find any good phylogentic data on the internal relationships of Sivapanthera so untill more research has been done, I'm choosing to lump all the Acinonyx-species except A. jubatus and all of Sivapanthera into A. pardinensis.
Three things really surprised me about Puma. Firstly, "Puma" pardoides - The Eurasian Puma or Owen's Panther, is apparently more basal than Miracinonyx and as such I've chosen to code it as its own genus by resurrecting "Viretailurus" as a name for it. I'm honestly surprised this is not praxis if "Puma" pardoides is indeed outside of crown-group Puma. Secondly, "Puma" pumoides (why are their names so similar?) is apparently more related to the jaguaroundi than to the cougar, and if that's true then surely the binomial should be "Herpailurus pumoides" - The Giant Jaguarundi? And thirdly, the recently described Puma incurva is from Early Pleistocene Africa, long after the split between Herpailurus and Puma ought to have taken place, and so it is probably part of crown-group Puma but it really makes me wonder whether we're missing a bunch of cougars throughout Eurasia considering Herpailurus and Puma are only found in the New World nowadays.
Lastly, different methods of analysing DNA (nuclear or mitochondrial) yields different results for whether Otocolobus is most closely related to Felis of Prionailurus so I've chosen to but it in a more basal position equally related to both. The relationships between Felis catus, F. lybica & F. silvestris is similar though consensus seems to be that F. lybica is the ancestor of F. catus. F. wenzensis might also be synonymous with F. lunensis but I haven't seen any hard evidence for that.
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Comments: 2
Gfan2015 [2023-11-30 19:58:42 +0000 UTC]
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adamgrogory In reply to Gfan2015 [2023-11-30 20:03:27 +0000 UTC]
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