Caturday felid trifecta: The woman with a thousand cats; Larry the Cat makes michief, but chases a fox away from Downing Street; a very early fossil felid; and lagniappe

Okay we’ll have a Caturday this week, but we’ll see about forthcoming weeks. If you have a cat-related item for me to consider, by all means send it along.

First, we have an eight-minute video of a real “cat lady”, who has over a thousand moggies. She’s turned her house into a sanctuary/rescue center/adoption center, so that’s not so “crazy.” They’ve saved 28,000 cats.

You can read more about “The Cat House on the Kings” by clicking on the link below:

Here’s a seven-minute video of a day in the life of the Cat House on the Kings:

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As you must know by now, Larry the Cat, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, turned nineteen, and has been at 10 Downing Street for 15 years, serving under seven Prime Ministers. Still he abides. Here’s a video of Larry “causing mischief,” though not everything it shows is “mischief”.

And here’s a short video of Larry chasing a rather emaciated fox from Downing Street. He may be a poor mouser and bad at catching birds, but he’s good at chasing off d*gs and other canids.

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Now it’s time to learn some cat evolution by reading about Proailurus, the earliest known “true cat” (i.e., an animal placed in the family Felidae). We find its fossils from about 30 million years ago, and you can read about it in this article by Will Newton from Discover Wildlife. It may have been the common ancestor of all cats today, but I consider that unlikely; it was probably related to the ancestor of all living felids, but finding THE “missing cat link” would be nearly impossible. But it does show us what a very early felid was like.

Click the screenshot to read.

A few excerpts (indented):

What was Proailurus?

Proailurus is an extinct cat that lived in Europe and Asia from the Late Oligocene (30 million years ago) to the Early Miocene (25 million years ago). It’s widely considered to be the first ‘true’ cat and the ancestor of the entire cat family, which includes everything from extinct sabre toothed cats to living lions, tigers, and leopards.

Proailurus is known from three different species, two of which – P.lemanensis and P.bourbonnensis – were roughly the size as a house cat, weighing in at 7-10kg. The third species, P.major, is thought to have been more than twice as large, but it’s only known from a single specimen and, as a result, is shrouded in mystery.

What did Proailurus look like?

Looking somewhat like a miniature cougar, Proailurus had a lengthy, low-slung back, relatively short limbs and a long, flexible tail. These features suggest it lived an arboreal lifestyle, hunting, resting, and perhaps even playing high up in the tree canopy. It may have also hunted on the ground, just like the modern Geoffroy’s cat (Leopardus geoffroyi).

This bodyplan and arboreal behaviour bears remarkable similarity to the fossa (Cryptoprocta ferox) – a cat-like predator found only on Madagascar.

. . . Where did Proailurus live?

The first remains of Proailurus were described in 1879 by French naturalist Henri Filhol who found a handful of small, cat-like fossils at a site in Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, Central France.

Since this discovery in the late 19th century, fossils of Proailurus have been unearthed in neighbouring Spain and Germany and, surprisingly, Mongolia. This suggests Proailurus had a very wide range and occupied a niche that had very few, if any major competitors.

Several fossils believed to belong to Proailurus, or at least a Proailurus-like animal, have been found in North America, including the famous Ginn Quarry cat. This specimen is represented by a complete skull, which has dentition very similar to the type species (P.lemanensis) originally described by Filhol.

The jury’s still out on whether the Ginn Quarry cat was truly a Proailurus, but its discovery suggests that cats – or at least cat-like animals – had already dispersed from Eurasia into North America, establishing a lineage that, millions of years later, would give rise to some of the largest cats that ever lived.

What did Proailurus originate from?

Proailurus is widely considered the first ‘true’ cat and the basal member of a family known as Felidae. This furry family is nestled within a larger mammalian order known as Carnivora, which includes everything from cats and dogs, to bears,mustelids, hyenas, and seals.

The origins of Carnivora can be traced back to the Early Eocene, roughly 52 million years ago and just 12 million years after the extinction event that wiped the non-avian dinosaurs from the face of the Earth.

The earliest carnivorans would have resembled small weasels or genets and, like many living carnivorans, would have likely been nocturnal. From these small, stealthy predators, two large sub-groups emerged: the feliforms and the caniforms.

While the caniforms diversified into an astonishing array of shapes and lifestyles (just look at how different skunks are from walruses, for example), the feliforms largely retained a sleek, agile body plan and exhibited far less diversity in terms of their morphology, diet, and behaviour.

And it’s from Feliformia that Proailurus, and its lineage Felidae, eventually emerged 30 million years ago.

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Lagniappe: Several items today, starting with this Facebook entry about a cat image being used to sell gin (see the text below the photo):

I’ve often shown medieval images of cats, asserting that for some reason artists of that era simply couldn’t draw even a decent moggy. Here’s a FB video showing some pathetic attempts to paint or draw cats. You can see more here and even more in the panoply of hilarious images at the Google Search page for “medieval cat paintings.”

This statue of Alice in Wonderland was photographed by Jean Greenberg in Central Park.  It shows two cats: Alice’s cat “Dinah” on her leg and the Cheshire Cat over her shoulder (see below).

h/t: Jean G., Ginger K.