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Not quite yet, Fluffy. Next week, I promise.

For today, though, on our feliform side quest of exploring how cats evolved it’s now 27 to 29 million years ago — Nandinia is now a thing, but the proto-families of you and your sister are still mixed up in one group that professional cat herders taxonomists call Feloidae. (Hassanin et al.)

Something called the Viverroidea has just split off from you — and quite frankly, anything starting in “viverr*” gives me the heebie-jeebies.

As the diagram shows, they’re ancestors to meerkats (and other mongooses), Malagasy carnivores, and even hyenas, but trying to keep track of “viverrids,”Viverridae,” and “Viverroidea” while reading up on cat evolution has always been a challenge.

So let’s just concentrate on that viverrid up at the top and check out some videos.

This is the group of “true civets” (African palm civets and some Malagasy “civets” are in other families).

Per Wikipedia at that last link:

Almost all viverrids outside the subfamily Genettinae are commonly called civets. The species of the subfamily Genettinae are known as genets and oyans…

The beautiful gray creature in the image at the top of this post is a small-toothed palm civet photographed at a zoo in Singapore.

Here are a couple of videos showing this elusive viverrid in the wilds of Sumatra and then in Thailand, respectively:

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It’s rather cat-like from a distance, but close-ups show how different this really is.

Over in Africa and some parts of Europe are genets, and they are much more feline in appearance:

Wildlife videographers sometimes have to frame a story, but leave it to Nature to come up with mysterious findings:

Speaking of oddities, what’s up with this viverrid?

More information:

• San Diego Zoo binturong page
• IUCN Red List status of various viverrids
• If you’re curious, here is something to get you started, Barrett’s view of the evolution of feliforms (jargon alert): “…I recover results that suggest there are three distinct ecospaces within which feliforms reside. The first is occupied by those small in overall size, covering a wide dietary and ecological spectrum, up to but not including hypercarnviory…The second ecopace is occupied by soft-flesh specialists, such as felids (cats) and nimravids… hypercarnivores…The third ecospace is that of hyaenids…”

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Some lagniappe:

It’s not easy to find documentaries on civets and genets, but here is a short feature on the masked palm civet:

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Featured image: shankar, s, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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