LAST ONE ON PURRING

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

We should now kill the purring thread - though why people are 
objecting to this when very few of you complained about the 
never-ending waste-of-space 'dragon'/'feathered serpent' thread I do 
not know. At least felid biology is relevant to dinosaurology - 
didn't you know there is fossil evidence for purring in theropods?
(Yeah, like Ghost Ranch coelophysids have fossil pop-tarts in their 
stomachs):)

As I said previously, _Panthera_ cats can only purr on out-breaths, 
while other cats can purr continuously. I erred when I said that 
_Panthera_ cats have a fully ossified hyoid: it is the other way 
round - _Panthera_ cats have an incompletely ossified hyoid, 
non-_Panthera_ cats a fully ossified one. Rely on your memory and you 
will always make mistakes.

Those of you saying that certain large cats, like cheetah, cannot 
purr, are incorrect. They can and do purr.

Let's bring some of you up to speed on felid phylogeny.. 'big cats' 
in the traditional sense are not a monophyletic group, as vast 
amounts of immunological, molecular, behavioural and morphological 
data indicates that cheetah (_Acinonyx_) are most closely related to 
pumas (_Puma_). Molecular data presented by O'Brien et al., as well 
as morphological and behavioural features, groups golden cats 
(_Profelis_), caracal (_Caracal_) and servals (_Leptailurus_) as 
outgroups to the puma-cheetah clade. Flat-headed/Fishing/Leopard cats 
(_Prionailurus_) are apparently the sister-group to the pantherine 
crown-group (which consists of _Lynx_, _Herpailurus_, _Neofelis_, 
_Pardofelis_ and _Panthera_) and are thus closer to _Panthera_ than 
is the puma-cheetah clade. Most distant from pantherines (tribe 
Pantherini) is the domestic cat lineage (_Felis_ s.s.) and the ocelot 
lineage (_Leopardus_). Ocelots are the most ancient of living cats 
and the most distinctive in terms of DNA and morphology (they have 
an aberrant number of chromosomes and neck fur that doesn't grow 
pointing toward the tail). Extant felids can thus be diagnosed as 
all descendants of the MRCA of ocelots and _Panthera_: this is clade 
Felinae, sister-group to Machairodontinae.

The phylogenetic species approach, when applied to felids (Wozencraft 
1993), means that we have to recognise numerous felid genera as 
opposed to a lumping of virtually all extant felids into _Felis_, the 
consensus approach of the past several decades (e.g. Guggisberg, 
Grzimek, Hvass, Nowak and Paradiso).

And mongooses are not viverrids, as it says in the current BBC 
Wildlife.

"You can't die"
"That's not my choice"

DARREN NAISH
darren.naish@port.ac.uk