Cat gap(en.wikipedia.org)

182 pointsby pxeger14 tahun yang lalu48 comments

en.wikipedia.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_gap

51 comments

graderjs4 tahun yang lalu

The Undying Lands, which until that time had been part of the World, were removed forever from the reach of mortal Men, though the Cats could still sail West and come there, if they would. It is to the Undying Lands that the White Ship sails at the end of 3rd Age (25 million years ago).

I like to think that the cats went off-world when the cat oracles foresaw that the age of man was coming.

theflyingelvis4 tahun yang lalu

But, then mankind created countertops and things to push off of counter tops. Then they returned to wreak havoc.

Additionally, they got hungry.

basicallydan4 tahun yang lalu

I suppose this doesn't fit on Wikipedia, but obviously one possible cause is that Cats are aliens from a planet abut 3.4 million lightyears away, and during that 7 million year period, all the cats left Earth suddenly because their planet needed them [1]. They used a near-light-speed vehicle to get there, solved the crisis on their home planet, then returned to continue their stewardship of Earth, and then the vehicle flew back.

Publishers, line up

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5k8ZQsZJpk

hnuser1234564 tahun yang lalu

It appears there are no galaxies between 3.26 and 3.9 ly away. Maybe they're from Andromeda at 2.5~3 ly, and took some time to accelerate and decelerate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF4 tahun yang lalu

It's lightyears as measured in cat years.

jaza4 tahun yang lalu

Got me reading up on Carnivora. Interesting, I never knew that walruses and seals are so closely related to canines and felines! Then again, I never studied biology, so there are no doubt plenty more similarly well-known fauna family ties that I never learned about.

samatman4 tahun yang lalu

Anyone who has met a sea lion up close knows that the name 'sea dog' was wasted on sharks. An error which has been corrected in the mascot of a few minor sports clubs.

jerrre4 tahun yang lalu

seals are called "sea dog" in many Germanic languages

jobigoud4 tahun yang lalu

And hyenas are closer to cats than to dogs.

DiggyJohnson4 tahun yang lalu

Hyenas are big cats, no? Is this not a commonly known fact?

fluoridation4 tahun yang lalu

They're not big cats, they're only feliforms. Big cats belong to felidae. But no, it's not commonly known that hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs.

DiggyJohnson4 tahun yang lalu

This blew my mind, we all walk around with some hilariously wrong assumptions. Thanks for the info.

SideburnsOfDoom4 tahun yang lalu

> Hyenas are big cats, no?

No.

DiggyJohnson4 tahun yang lalu

This is blowing my mind. Thank you for the clear answer.

SideburnsOfDoom4 tahun yang lalu

I always thought of Hyenas as more like "big dogs" - compare with these canids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_wild_dog

But in reality, Hyenas are neither cats nor dogs.

rsynnott4 tahun yang lalu

Mr. President, we must not allow a cat gap!

(Actually, there _is_ a cat gap: https://i.redd.it/pifb0yx0xii41.png)

boomboomsubban4 tahun yang lalu

I assumed this was about the European (maybe only English?) practice of keeping mummified cats in a gap in your house to keep away witches. Dunno what topic is more grim, millions of potentially catless years or a mummified cat in your walls.

b1124 tahun yang lalu

I have no mummified cats, yet I have plenty of mummified mice, due to their sheer numbers, and therefore deaths.

I presume this is due to a lack of mummified cats in my walls, which would clearly keep mice mummies away, so I shall precure some posthaste!

boomboomsubban4 tahun yang lalu

You've got it wrong, obviously the witches put the mummified mice in your walls. You need the mummified cat to keep the witches at bay.

b1124 tahun yang lalu

So the mice are the inverse, magically speaking.

blueflow4 tahun yang lalu

Do you have a source on the fact that this was done intentionally?

I only knew that cats go into hiding then they feel their end is near, that they do this on their own. Thus most "cat is missing" posters actually mean their cat died but kept it secret from its humans.

boomboomsubban4 tahun yang lalu

Turns out there is a Wikipedia article on the subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dried_cat

Warning, the article does contain pictures, though not nearly as bad as the ones I saw trying to find the article.

thenthenthen4 tahun yang lalu

I found a mummified cat when renovating a house in Northern France. Always thought the cat must have eaten rat poison/poisoned rat and therefor mummified. How are these preserved? It didn't look embalmed in anyway.

boomboomsubban4 tahun yang lalu

I tried to look up an answer, the first page suggests they just stuck them in there. Then I decided I've seen my fill of dried cats for today so someone else can look it up.

6502nerdface4 tahun yang lalu

If this interests you, then I highly recommend The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives by Turner and Anton [1]. The illustrations of ancient cat species are almost forensic in style and realism, showing details of muscle and tissue placement, and the text relates a number of fascinating fossil stories, for example a sinkhole into which a sabertooth cat and its prey tumbled, presumably while wrestling to the death, to be entombed together for megayears.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Big-Cats-Their-Fossil-Relatives/dp/02...

unethical_ban4 tahun yang lalu

One of the few instances I recall of being swayed by "intelligent design" theories as a lad was what they called the "lack of transitional fossil records". I forget most of it because I tend to believe organized worship of a figure is probably nothing but a cult for power and control. But it supposed that something like a bat would have to have evolved wings, according to Darwin. Then it must mean that it evolved from a mammal that didn't have wings - so then why are there not fossils of weird bat-rats?

For all I know, there are in fact such fossils, or any of about 15 other explanations, because the book which I was being homeschooled with, "Biology from a Christian Perspective" or similar, also tried to disprove evolution unironically by describing how many monkeys it would take over a few million years to have randomly pounded out the Bible.

Anyway, the cat gap is proof that God hated kittens.

pavlov4 tahun yang lalu

There's a simpler explanation for the rareness of bat fossils:

"Bat fossils are extremely rare. Ancient bats, like their modern counterparts, were small and fragile, and they tended to live in tropical habitats, where decay occurs very rapidly. Just about the only way a bat can become fossilized is if it dies in a place where it is swiftly covered with sediment that protects it from scavengers and microorganisms alike."

However a transitional bat fossil was discovered around 2000, so probably after your school book was written:

"Onychonycteris, however, has a combination of archaic and modern traits that make it exactly the sort of transitional creature evolutionary biologists have longed for.

"We chose the genus name Onychonycteris (“clawed bat”) because the fossil displays claws on all five fingers, just as its terrestrial predecessors did. The presence of these claws is not the only feature of Onychonycteris that recalls nonflying mammals. Most bats have very long forearms and tiny hind limbs. Onychonycteris, however, has proportionately shorter forearms and proportionately longer hind limbs than those of other bats. Compared with other mammals, the limb proportions of Onychonycteris are intermediate between those of all previously known bats (including Icaronycteris) and those of arboreal mammals that rely heavily on their forelimbs for locomotion, such as sloths and gibbons. These animals hang from branches much of the time as they climb around in the trees. Perhaps bats evolved from arboreal ancestors that used a similar form of locomotion.

"Despite these primitive limb features, other aspects of the anatomy of Onychonycteris indicate that it was capable of powered flight. Its long fingers would have supported wing membranes, and robust clavicles (collarbones) would have helped anchor the forelimbs to the body. Meanwhile a wide rib cage and a keeled sternum would have supported large flight muscles, and a faceted scapula would have secured other specialized, flight-related muscles."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/uncovering-bat-ev...

GlennS4 tahun yang lalu

I was originally just going to link to a Colugo, which I think are still pretty cool, and probably good evidence of what early stages of vertebrate flight looked like. Functionally they're not doing full flight like a bat, but their flight is still quite a bit better than a flying squirrel, a sugar glider, or one of the assorted other gliding mammals can do. You can see them flapping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIgv8Qw--kk

Like the flying squirrel example given by another poster, they're not closely related to bats. Actually quite closely related to us though.

Bats: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@CHIROPTERA=574724 Colugos: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@DERMOPTERA=987673 Flying squirrels: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petinomys=43434 Sugar gliders: https://www.onezoom.org/life/@Petauridae=323245

But the bat transitional fossils is also an interesting question. And some Googling finds this, which you might enjoy: https://arstechnica.com/science/2008/02/earliest-bat-fossil-...

onionisafruit4 tahun yang lalu

In that Colugo video the speaker says “they actually built a show around this shot”. Any idea what show he’s talking about?

Also tiny cameras have come a long way since that video was made.

GlennS4 tahun yang lalu

I don't, sorry, just found it by Googling.

micromacrofoot4 tahun yang lalu

One thing people often miss is that fossils are extraordinarily rare. The general thought is that less than .1% of all species to ever exist have been fossilized. The conditions need to be perfect.

Honestly it's amazing we know as much as we do. It's not easy to preserve something for hundreds of years, let alone millions or billions.

jimmytidey4 tahun yang lalu

What are flying squirrels if not an in between state rodents evolving to fly?

samatman4 tahun yang lalu

Exactly, sugar gliders and seals mean we don't need transitional fossils between 'land bats' and flying ones, or between 'land dolphins' and aquatic ones: we can already see that evolution can get a similar organism partway there, and if we find some smoking-gun fossils later, so much the better.

ginko4 tahun yang lalu

Flying squirrels evolved gliding independently from bats. Bats aren't rodents and they're not closely related.

alexvoda4 tahun yang lalu

Precisely, we are witnessing evolution in a similar direction in real time.

Hundreds of thousands of years in the future, their descendants might actually be flying not gliding.

ChrisMarshallNY4 tahun yang lalu

I think that we are finding more and more "transitional" fossils.

Fossils are actually incredibly rare, especially at more than a couple of million years old. For every fossil, there were probably a million dead critters that never became fossils (figure pulled right out of my nethers).

Nowadays, it's a given that birds are dinosaurs (theropods, to be precise). There have been enough transitionals, to establish that. I think the latest Jurassic Park finally has a feathered dinosaur in it. When the first movie came out, the look of the "lizards" was pretty much what everyone thought, so a lot has happened, in less than thirty years.

XorNot4 tahun yang lalu

For anyone who's not seen it, one of the most incredible finds is a dinosaur tail which was preserved in amber: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38224564

And very obviously has feathers.

ChrisMarshallNY4 tahun yang lalu

The new Prehistoric Planet[0] series, on AppleTV, takes the “birdlike dinosaur” to extremes.

It looks like they used bird attributes to “fill in the gaps,” everywhere. For example, all the eyes are bird eyes, and the motion capture seems to be from birds.

[0] https://tv.apple.com/us/show/prehistoric-planet/umc.cmc.4lh4...

WorldMaker4 tahun yang lalu

This argument is even technically named the "God of the Gaps" argument that some of these believers feel that God can only "live" in the gaps of our knowledge, our scientific studies, our available records, so they are always looking for new gaps and always making cases that those gaps "prove" their idea of God.

The fortunate bit for them is that science is a slow, human discovery process and will always have gaps. For a scientist, this is where the wonder of science is: making hypotheses about things we don't know and then going out and finding it with as much rigor as they can think to apply.

The unfortunate bit for these particular sorts of believers that can't imagine their God living in science, that can't imagine their God wanting people to know as much about the world around them as possible, is that while there are always gaps, they are always shrinking or getting "solved" with new theories or new records/discoveries. At some point the only way to "protect the gaps" and thus protect their idea of God, their God of the Gaps, is to lean hard into ignorance and distrust of science. (Sometimes I almost feel sorry for them and that lack of imagination and/or trust that their God cannot exist in science/beyond just hiding in gaps like a creature of darkness.)

As another example of a "closed gap", in addition to some of the other good ones in sibling comments here, that I appreciate because it is very much an ur-example in that a symbol for atheism in counter to that gap has long been the "evolve fish" with legs, which also long seemed like a gap in the fossil record, especially to the "God of the Gaps" crowd.

Since those days we've closed that gap and found fossils of the Tiktaalik and done all sorts of science around the first land fishes, our lobe-finned ancestors that made the first "steps" onto land, the real life "evolve fish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik

The plush form is very cute if you want a memento of this scientific discovery. Currently sold out, but some museums may have some: https://pri-gift-shop.myshopify.com/collections/plush/produc...

[deleted]4 tahun yang lalu

Karellen4 tahun yang lalu

All fossils are transitional fossils.

falcor844 tahun yang lalu

Not if the fossil's species then goes extinct before spawning any descendant species.

hatware4 tahun yang lalu

Nice, love stuff like this. Also see /r/CulturalLayer and /r/AlternativeHistory.

Kind of hard to say we know what we're doing when there's 7 million year gaps.

captainmuon4 tahun yang lalu

In this case, it is not that we don't know what was going on, or just couldn't find the cats. Cat-like animals were actually gone from in North America in that period.

TedDoesntTalk4 tahun yang lalu

No, they were taken to Planet Taco by the alien cats. Years later they revolted, commandeered some ships, and returned to North America.

stefan8r4 tahun yang lalu

waynecochran4 tahun yang lalu

someweirdperson4 tahun yang lalu

Searching that page for "virus" yields zero hits. Any reason why that would not be a pausible cause?

SimplyUnknown4 tahun yang lalu

If they died from a virus, why wouldn't they have fossilized like the earlier or later perished cats? It is then more likely that they haven't died there (e.g., migrated away) or died under circumstances that they died under conditions that they couldn't have fossilized (e.g., volcanic eruption).

samatman4 tahun yang lalu

Just as a point of order, volcanic eruptions are responsible for a great deal of the fossils we actually have.

Pompeii is too new for actual fossilization to have occurred, naturally, but it clearly shows why eruption is so good for the fossil record: that, flash floods, and tar pits, are the three best ways to envelop a corpse before it's devoured.

masklinn4 tahun yang lalu

I think they’re talking about the cause of the gap e.g. a virus would have emerged and killed all the nimravids.