Hypercarnivorous Tendency As A Probable Cause of The Cat Gap
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. Over the past 50 million years, successive clades of small and large carnivorous mammals diversified and then declined to extinction. In most instances, the cause of the decline was energetic constraints and pervasive selection for larger size (Cope's rule) that lead to (hypercarnivory) dietary specialization. Hypercarnivory leads to increased vulnerability of extinction.
The nimravids were large cats that occupied this ecomorphic niche in the ecosystem until 26 Ma. It is highly likely that their hypercarnivory led to their extinction in North America. After the extinction of the nimravids there were no other feliform or Felidae species until other felids arrived from Eurasia after crossing the Bering land bridge 18.5 million years ago. During this time there was great diversity among the other carnivorous mammals in North America – both hypocarnivory and hypercarnivory species – and other hypercarnivory species existed before, during, and after the cat gap.
Read more about this topic: Cat Gap
Famous quotes containing the words tendency, probable, cat and/or gap:
“Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“I hope I may claim in the present work to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequently a priori. Arithmetic thus becomes simply a development of logic, and every proposition of arithmetic a law of logic, albeit a derivative one. To apply arithmetic in the physical sciences is to bring logic to bear on observed facts; calculation becomes deduction.”
—Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)
“As I walked on the glacis I heard the sound of a bagpipe from the soldiers’ dwellings in the rock, and was further soothed and affected by the sight of a soldier’s cat walking up a cleated plank in a high loophole designed for mus-catry, as serene as Wisdom herself, and with a gracefully waving motion of her tail, as if her ways were ways of pleasantness and all her paths were peace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Great talkers are trying to fill the gap between themselves and others, but only widen it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)