page_title: Cat gap
section_title: Changes in climate and habitat
hierarchical_section_title: Cat gap / Possible causes / Changes in climate and habitat
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Leopard auf einem Baum liegend. English: Leopard relaxing on a tree. Čeština: Levhart skvrnitý odpočívající na stromě
context_page_description: The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. The cause of the "cat gap" is disputed, but may have been caused by changes in the climate, changes in the habitat and environmental ecosystem, the increasingly hypercarnivorous trend of the cats, volcanic activity, evolutionary changes in dental morphology of the Canidae species present in North America, or a periodicity of extinctions called van der Hammen cycles.
context_section_description: Another possible explanation for the extinction of feliforms in North America is changes in the ecology of the continent. Evidence from the geologic temperature record shows that the earth was experiencing a period of global cooling, causing forests to give way to savannas. Climatic changes to arid conditions that muted variation at about 25.8 Ma coincides with the first appearance of hoglike creodonts and of pocket gophers, and this also is the beginning of the "cat gap" and the "entelodont gap", a period of some 7 million years when there were no nimravids, felids, or entelodonts in North America. Faunal overturn at 25.8 Ma is the basis for division of the Arikareean time period (30.5–19 Ma), and the Arikareen NALMA (North American Land-Mammal Ages), into the Monroecreekian period (29.5–25.8 Ma), and then the Harrisonian period (25.8–23.5 Ma).
  Why did these cat-like creatures die out in North America (while surviving in Eurasia) with no replacement by the true cats? Their fate may be owed to the same factors that created the diversity of herbivorous mammals, for most cats need forest or cover from which to hunt. In an increasingly open America the nimravids may have found themselves without an ecological perch to hunt from, particularly if the competition with dogs prevented them from colonising the savannas.
caption: Many cats tend to be arboreal hunters. The disappearance of forests in North America may have caused the mass extinction.
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