Cat gap
The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18. 5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. The turning point for cats came about with the appearance of a new genus of felids, Pseudaelurus. Hypercarnivory leads to increased vulnerability to extinction.
About Cat gap in brief
The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18. 5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. The turning point for cats came about with the appearance of a new genus of felids, Pseudaelurus. Hypercarnivory leads to increased vulnerability to extinction. The history of carnivorous mammals is characterized by a series of rise-and-fall patterns of diversification, in which declining clades are replaced by phylogenetically distinct but functionally similar clades. Their fate may be owed to the same factors that created the diversity of herbivorous mammals, such as the need for forest cover for cats, Harrison Harrison says. The cat gap also coincides with the first appearance of hoglike creodonts and of pocketophers, and this is the beginning of the “entelodontont gap” Harrison: The time period is the basis for the division of Arikareean time into the Monroecian period and then the Nroecan period.
It is also known as the Faunal overturn at 25 to 8 Ma, when there were no nimravids, entelodons, or entonts in North American. It also is the period when there was little variation in the habitat and environmental ecosystem of the North American continent, Harrison writes. It may have been caused by changes in the climate and changes in habitat and ecosystem, volcanic activity, evolutionary changes in dental morphology of the Canidae species present in N America, or a periodicity of extinctions called van der Hammen cycles. The cause of the ‘cat gap’ is disputed, but may be caused by the increasingly hyperc Carnivorous trend of the cats, he says. There were other earlier cat- like species but Proailurus, which appeared about 30 million years ago, is generally considered the first “true cat”.
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This page is based on the article Cat gap published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
