So I’m permanently taking over the Tuesday Queue for Adam, and I’m also temporarily taking over Monday and Wednesday for Alex this week. What does that mean? It means I’m writing four Queue’s this week, and that means I’m going to talk about stuff that interests me in the opening of these here Queue’s. For instance, the many, many times predatory mammals developed a catlike body and saber teeth. We have the Machairodontinae of course, what would be consider the true sabre-toothed cats, with species such as Smilodon and Homotherium, but there are also animals that aren’t cats at all that developed this body plan, such as the Barbourofelid lineage, which you’d be forgiven for thinking were cats. (They’re close relatives, but not true cats.) The slightly more distantly related Nimravids also developed sabre teeth and a catlike form, such as Hoplophoneus.
But not all of the sabre-toothed mammals were part of this closely related Nimravid to Feline family grouping. There were sabre toothed creodonts, such as Machaeroides, and marsupials such as Thylacosmilus. And of course I’ve discussed Gorgonopsids such as Inostrancevia before – Therapisds like the Gorgonopsids predate the dinosaurs, and are incredibly ancient cousins to modern mammals. Wikipedia has a decent write up of all the various sabre tooth lineages in the mammals and mammal ancestors.
I was going to go on, but we’ll move into questions now. Tomorrow I may talk about Epicyon.