Large Pleistocene Felines of North America

Abstract

About thirty occurrences of true cats, felines, of the size of pumas or larger have been reported in the Pleistocene of North America. Except for the specimens from the asphalt of Rancho La Brea and of Mc- Kittrick, in California, these are nevertheless relatively rare fossils and the specimens are usually fragmentary. They have been assigned by various students to about fifteen different species and their affinities and taxonomy have not been understood. Many have been placed in extinct, or supposedly extinct, species with no definite idea as to their relationships to other cats. A few have been recognized as pumas, or as related to pumas, but on the other hand some that are pumas beyond much doubt have been sharply separated from that group. Others have loosely been called "lions" or "tigers" without clear demonstration of a reason for such explicit terms and in spite of the fact that they are related only remotely and not in any exclusive way to those Old World forms. There has indeed been a general tendency to compare our larger fossil felines with those of the Eastern Hemisphere and to minimize or omit entirely comparisons with other American cats, in spite of the fact that the latter comparisons would seem more obvious and are in most cases, perhaps in all, truer indications of affinity. It is particularly striking that (with one cryptic and unexplained partial exception, noted later) no one seems to have reported jaguars in the Pleistocene of the United States and few have seriously considered this rather obvious possibility.