10. There are no wildcats in the Americas.
No way! We English speakers have always called bobcats “wildcats” and they are very much around.
I’m sorry but “Way,” and here’s how that works.
Bobcats are small wild cats and very cute, except when they destroy someone’s livestock or poultry.
But have you ever shown these “wildcats” to someone from Africa or Eurasia and then wondered why they were so surprised at seeing a lynx?
Or perhaps you were traveling in those places when someone excitedly pointed out a wildcat, but it only looked like a house cat to you?
There’s this confusion because wildcats in Africa and Eurasia — while also being small, wild, and cute, except when they raid someone’s property — are not lynxes.
They resemble house cats, too, which just adds to the confusion although the resemblance is for a cool reason:
- Fluffy’s daddy was the long-legged, graceful African wildcat.
- Fluffy’s granddaddy was a grouchy little fur ball known as the European wildcat.
H. sapiens and Felis silvestris (which is a wildcat scientific name) first started their love-hate relationship in the Middle East eleven or twelve thousand years ago, soon after the last ice age was over.
Biologists had long suspected that this was where cats were domesticated, but it was only confirmed by genetic testing early in this century.
As the post-Ice Age world was warming up, we were getting into farming for the first time, and our neighbor the African wildcat — curious and tolerant enough of humans to get close and poke around in our stuff — decided that our rodent-attracting grain stores and the many hidey-holes provided by our new buildings were the Happy Hunting Grounds. The little wildcat moved in.
Not all wildcats can do that. European and Asian types, for instance, avoid us at all costs.
Luckily for Fluffy-lovers everywhere, African wildcats are a little more sociable. No doubt treats and eventual purring/cuddling sessions helped things along.
There have been many developments since then, of course, but we don’t need to look at those here.
We need to meet the grouchy little fur ball and get to the Americas.
Well, Crabby Cat — the original European wildcat since 350,000 to 450,000 BC — couldn’t swim the Atlantic Ocean, so migrating to America was not an option.
Crabby therefore stayed in Europe and grumbled about the ice-age weather.
A few of its kind did do something about it, wandering off into warmer climates, 50,000 years ago, losing their long fur coats, slimming down, getting springier legs, and otherwise adapting to African and Asian habitats in various ways.
These became the “steppe cats” and they include the African wildcat.
Steppe wildcats apparently never traveled far enough into Asia to reach and cross over to North America on the Bering land bridge that appeared whenever Pleistocene ice cap formation lowered global sea levels.
So steppe cats didn’t make it to the Americas, either.
Lynxes somehow did, and that’s why there are native “wildcats” here today.
Humans developed ways to cross oceans, and then wildcats, in the form of Fluffy, finally did conquer the world.
It wasn’t just colonialism. Genetic testing shows that domestic cats have traveled with us for thousands of years. (Oh, and of course Trim up there has its own Wikipedia page!)
11. Until recently, there were NO cats in South America.
You might have noticed that Fact #10 was about the Americas but only covered North America.
That was on purpose. Today South America has several adorable little wild cats and one big cat — the jaguar, which is also adorable in its own way.
They’re a handful, not just because of built-in feline feistiness but also in terms of language and science.
Let’s tackle language first, ¡olé!
“Wildcat” translates to gato montés in Spanish, but Spanish-language Wikipedia will tell you that el gato montés is, among other felines, a bobcat — exactly the opposite of the point we were correctly making in Fact #10.
So here we are at Fact #11.
Actually, Wikipedia is correct, too, because they’re talking about culture.
A bobcat, by any name, is a beautiful creature.
English speakers call bobcats “wildcats” and Spanish speakers use their own term for it (gato montés de Norteamérica).
The true wildcat is gato montés euroasiático (Crabby Cat AND the steppe wildcats of Asia and Africa).
The scientific names for these beautiful species are always in Latin and unchanged. But how many of us think of cats in terms of Latin?
Just to round out the list, two local cats that are unknown north of the Rio Grande (or anywhere else in the world) are in there as well: Geoffroy’s cat (gato montés sudamericano) and the pampas cat (gato montés).
It’s worth mentioning these South American small cats by name because each and every one of them, plus the Andean cat way high up in the mountains, are weird.
That’s not very scientific, so let’s put it this way:
The cats have fewer chromosomes than the rest of the world’s cats (36 vs. 38).
Many small South American cats look very much alike — even experienced field workers sometimes go by the nose color to tell pampas and Andean cats apart. Yet down in the lowlands, pampas cats have a totally different look!
The small cats also hybridize so often that researchers have difficulty mapping out boundaries between species.
Evolutionary flexibility like this usually happens when a new habitat opens up for species.
Obviously something BIG opened up for cats in South America, but what was it?
South America. An entire continent opened up for cats and many other animals and plants.
Earth’s actual soundtrack for this event is unknown.
Plate tectonics studies show that South America has been surrounded by water for most of the last several tens of millions of years, rafting along with marsupial (pouched) mammals dominating the passenger list.
Cats are not marsupials. Like the rest of us placental mammals they nourish developing young inside the mother’s body.
And since the continent was still “out there” as cats evolved in the Northern Hemisphere during the Miocene, there never could have been any cats aboard the SS Sudamerica.
When plate tectonic processes hooked up North and South America recently — geologists consider a time span of less than three million years ago “recent” — cats found all sorts of new opportunities. They started to have what biologists call an adaptive radiation.
And they’re still at it.
Everything we see today, including the weird features noted above, is just a freeze-frame of the extended story that small cats are making for themselves in South America.
12. North America has a “cat gap” in its fossil record.
This “blast from the past” is just a quickie, since Facts #10 and #11 are a bit long.
Imagine it’s the Eocene epoch in North America — the calendar shows it’s 35 Ma (million years ago). Lots of animals are around, but they look rather different from what we’re used to.
Here comes a short-faced, sabertoothed predator with retractable claws. It is overall built like a cat, although it’s not much bigger than today’s bobcat.
It can’t see you, of course, since we’re only here in imagination, but all the plant-eaters around the waterhole become alert and slowly move away as the creature stalks down to the shoreline for a drink.
That is a nimravid and probably not related to cats despite the similar appearance, which led early taxonomists to call them “paleofelids.”
There are some barbourodelids in here — a whole ‘nother fangly story! — but Quercylurus and some of the other “cats” reconstructions are nimravids.
However, nimravids are the very first cat-like predator found in the fossil record.
No one knows where they came from, but nimravids thrived in North America at least five million years before cats evolved (probably in Eurasia).
This diverse, very successful group of predators ranged all across the northern continents, but North American nimravids died out around 26 Ma.
Roughly eight million years passed after that without any cat-like fossils showing up in the continent’s fossil record. This is the cat gap.
Then one of the first true cats, Pseudaelurus, crossed a land bridge into North America — a feat that its grouchy little fur-ball descendant and ALMOST all of its relatives would completely fail to duplicate 18 million years later.
Meanwhile, in Downing Street, they know who really rules today’s world;
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Flight To Wonder 