Andrew Cuff, Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Liverpool, joins Cheddar Reveals to discuss the history and evolution of big cats, and what the future of this species may look like. 

Cheddar Reveals

The Evolution of Big Cats

Welcome back to cheddar reveals, brought to you by curiosity stream. The big cats we know today have come a long way from their prehistoric relatives. So what exactly does the origin of big cats actually look like? And what are some of the factors that have played a major role in their evolution, joining us now to answer these questions and so many more. Andrew cuff, lecturer in anatomy at the University of Liverpool. Andrew. What did the first cat look like it? And how does that compare to kind of cats, big or small that we know today? So the first cats probably about 30 million years ago when it evolved something called Pro Delores. And it doesn't really look like what we consider cats to look like today. The first one uh looks a bit like what we would consider a gen it or a civet too. So these are species that live today that are somewhat closely related to cats and its body shape looks a bit like if you cross the cat with the mongoose, you get slightly shorter legs, but a much longer bodies, longer neck and a longer face and snout. But we're talking about a body size, not dissimilar to modern cats. So we're looking at sort of 9 10 kg. So about £20. So a fairly small cat is how the origins of the cat family starts. How far back in time, then can we date bigger cats? You know, I think the tigers, lions and such. Yeah, so are our big cats in the Panthera lineage? The Lions, Tigers, leopards, jaguars? Their lineage arises around sort of 10 million years ago. But we don't start finding fossils of them until about 56 million years ago and they don't start getting to the big sizes that we see today until about four or five million years ago. If we look at the other big cats, things like pumas and cheetahs, we find first bigger fossils of them starting to show up around two million years ago. So it's quite a while that they've they've been big. What are some of the ways that that these big cats have evolved from what you were talking about a moment ago, that looked like kind of that mongoose cat mix to these obviously bigger cats that we know today. Um To be honest, there evolution is fairly conservative. Modern cats, big and small, all are very similar looking to each other. If you take a domestic house cat and make it 10 times the size that will look very similar to a modern lion, they are very conservative in their morphology because the cat morphology works. They are supreme predators at all sizes. Um some of the small differences you might see in the shape of the face. So if you look at a lion or a tiger, you see they have this more elongate snout which domestic cats don't have and you might find that their four limbs are slightly different. So big cats use their forearms to help grapple prey that's bigger than themselves. And so you find that they have these slightly bigger muscles in their forearms, then say these small cats, but that's about it. They are very similar, interesting. Um I wonder over the evolution of the cat kind of species, so to speak here. Were there any cats that didn't make it that ended up going extinct? And why? Yeah, there's a huge host of cats that die out. And so if we just take the modern lineage, the Pantera lineage, we find that there are really big lions across North America and Eurasia that go extinct about 10,000 years ago. There was a North American Cheetah, probably more closely related to modern puma, but that lived until about 10,000 years ago. And I heard earlier that you were talking about home ethereum, this whole other group of the saber tooth cats, the macula don, today they get really big really early in their evolution about 60 million years ago. We start getting really big versions of them, but they all go extinct about 10,000 years ago. And this is probably two fold. There's a combination of climate change going on about 10,000 years ago. We get the end of the ice ages and so we lose a large amount of habitat across north America and asia, we lose these giant grassland steps and as we lose this habitat, we lose the big herbivores that are living on it. The wooly mammoths, the rhinos and buffalo, that sort of thing all start disappearing. We lose the big herbivores, we then lose the big carnivores. At the same time, humans are probably playing a really important role in this. Humans are dispersing around the world and becoming quite numerous at the time. We're also hunting these large herbivores so directly competing with these big cats and also probably hunting and trying to kill off these big cats, which may well be hunting us at the same time. When I look at big cats, I'm always curious what other species could be related to them. What are those species? Big cats today? Actually all have fairly small relatives as their nearest relatives. So if we look at the panthera lineage, the lion tiger, snow leopard, jaguar. Their nearest relative is a clouded leopard. I've got one up the picture up on my wall, beautiful species from Southeast Asia and they're not very big, is sort of a small to medium sized cat. If we look at the puma and the cheetah, their nearest relative is something called the jaguar indie, which is a species of cat found in central and south America. And that again, is a small to medium sized cat. What we find is these big cats are evolved this big sized, completely separately and convergent lee. And so in fact the puma and the cheetah are more closely related to a domestic cat than they are to a lion or a tiger. Finally, here are our big cats going to continue to evolve. You know, what are some of your predictions for the future of the cat family? And I wonder that really in particular around when you were talking about the evolution of cats and some of the factors that lead to extinction or even the change in that evolution, those factors still present in terms of like human kind of evolution itself and then even, you know, global warming and climate change happening in real time today. Yes. So there, the chances of big cats evolving is just gonna depend on whether they're still here and that depends on us and whether we can serve them. So tigers and lions for example, have lost huge amounts of their habitat and uh, a combination of hunting of them poaching as well as losing their prey items? If we don't give cats a chance to live, they will not evolve. The other thing that may happen is if we don't push them to extinction but keep them in smaller areas, they actually may evolve smaller body sizes again, just because they don't have the ability to get to these big sizes that we see in tigers and lions today. So we may end up just with a loss of our big cats and keep lots of smaller cats interesting before I do let you go actually, let's end on a fun note here, What are some of your fun kind of facts that you enjoy about big cats? So, we I've talked about cats basically doing the same with the smaller big I'm sure many people have seen the videos of big cats jumping in boxes and destroying boxes. Just like little cats do. I absolutely love that. But my other fact that I I really enjoyed was um in sanctuaries and particularly they like using enrichment activities for their big cats to keep them um active, keep them busy, keep their minds working. And something that all cats seem to love is sent. And one of the things that they use as scent is actually perfume and cologne. So if you are keeping an eye out, some of your local sanctuaries may put out things for enrichment and they may want your perfume or cologne if you're not using it or you don't like the smell. I'm sure the big cats might. I'm not a bit of a daredevil, but if I were, it would be to pick a perfume based on kind of the big cats preference. Really enjoy your time and your insight. Andrew cuff. Lecturer in Anatomy at the University of Liverpool