…Recently, on YouTube, I came across a video discussion
about ‘big cats’ vs. ‘little cats’, and how those terms are confusing. Here are
my two cents about them.
Firstly, these terms are not scientific, but more of lay. In
reality, you can describe all animals, including wild cat species, as either ‘big’
or ‘little’, but from taxonomy’s point of view, most of the big cats belong to
the genus Panthera, or – the roaring cats, (because they can roar). Currently,
this genus consists of the lion, the tiger, the leopard, the jaguar, and – the snow
leopard, (or ounce). The clouded leopard, (well, leopards – there are two
species of them), belongs to the sister group of the Panthera cats, Neofelis,
and together, the two genera compose the Pantherinae subfamily of the cat
family.
So far so good, it can also be added that the ounce, while
it is more often called the snow leopard, is much more closely related to the
tiger, while the scientists are not currently sure, just who is more closely
related to the lion – the jaguar or the leopard. The tiger and the ounce are
the closest relatives of each other among the roaring cats though, even though
the ounce really does look more like a leopard, which is why it is much more
commonly called the snow leopard. What next?
The other ‘big cats’ of the modern world are usually the
cheetah and the puma, (also cougar, mountain lion, catamount, panther, etc.). They
are a part of the Felinae family, aka the non-roaring cats, which contains all
of the cats that do not belong to the Panthera and Neofelis genera. Usually,
the scientists call the cheetah and the puma ‘the Puma lineage’, which consists
of the cheetah, the puma, and the jaguarundi, which looks nothing like a
jaguar. Really, this small-headed, short-legged, long-bodied wildcat looks more
like a weasel of some sort, not a cat. It lives in Central and South America,
eating various small animals – rodents, birds, small reptiles, arthropods. They
even eat some plants too. It is much smaller than the cheetah and the puma are,
but then again, the cheetah is not really big, it is merely tall, as is the
giraffe. I.e., the giraffe is tall, the elephant is big, (look at the two side
by side to see the difference), the cheetah is also tall, while the lion is
also big. This is different.
The cougar, (or the puma), on the other hand, is genuinely
large, about the same size as the leopard, (or the smaller jaguars) is, and is
built like a leopard too. As such, it is truly is a big cat size-wise, but on
the other hand? It cannot roar. The jaguar can, and so can the leopard, but
both the cheetah and the puma cannot, just as their cousin the jaguarundi cannot.
As such, they are ‘little cats’, even though there is nothing little about
them, particularly the puma, but from taxonomic point of view, they are.
Period.
Hence lies the root of confusion between ‘big’ and ‘little’
cats: the scientific and non-scientific terms do not fully match. The wild cats
are not unique with this problem; other animals have it too – the whales, for
example.
Just like ‘big’ and ‘little cats’, ‘whale’ isn’t exactly a
scientific term; science divides the cetaceans into two parvorders: the
Mysticeti, or the baleen whales, and the Odontoceti, or the toothed whales. …There’s
also the Archaeoceti, but all of those mammals have died out, (or not, and
instead they are the truth behind the sea serpent myth as some cryptozoologists
exclaim, but until a genuine sea serpent is captured and studied, they are
still considered mythical, and the Archaeoceti – extinct).
Anyhow, most of the cetaceans known as ‘whales’ belong to
the Mysticeti, the baleen whales; the Odontoceti or the toothed whales have
proportionally far fewer ‘whales’ among their number, as opposed to ‘dolphins’,
‘porpoises’ or ‘blackfish’, and only the biggest of them all – the sperm whale –
is usually treated as a ‘proper’ whale in non-scientific terms. Everyone else
is usually considered ‘something else’; that is especially ironic since the
sperm whale’s closest official relatives, the so-called dwarf sperm whale and
the pygmy sperm whale, are among the smallest members of the cetacean clade.
Sadly, they are also among the most obscure, shy, retiring and least studied
members of the clade too, so we’ll talk about them some other time instead…
…And that is that for this talk; see you all soon!
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