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:
“Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“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)
““A young man in the dark am I
But a wild old man in the light
That can make a cat laugh, or
Can touch by mother wit
Things hid in their marrow bones
From time long passed away....””
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“So while it is true that children are exposed to more information and a greater variety of experiences than were children of the past, it does not follow that they automatically become more sophisticated. We always know much more than we understand, and with the torrent of information to which young people are exposed, the gap between knowing and understanding, between experience and learning, has become even greater than it was in the past.”
—David Elkind (20th century)