Asia could have heard first roar of the big cats
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An ancient skull found in the Tibet Autonomous Region indicates that big cats originated in central Asia, and not Africa as widely thought, palaeontologists said yesterday.
Dated between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old, the fossil is the oldest ever found of a pantherine felid, as big cats are called. The previous record holder — tooth fragments found in Tanzania — are estimated to be around 3.8 million years old.
“This find suggests that big cats have a deeper evolutionary origin than previously suspected,” said Jack Tseng of the University of Southern California, who led the study.
Big cats, a group called Pantherinae, include tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards and jaguars.
Their evolutionary odyssey has been hotly discussed, spiced by a lack of fossil evidence to settle the debate.
Tseng, accompanied by his wife and fellow palaeontologist, Juan Liu, and Gary Takeuchi of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, made the find in 2010 in a remote border region between China’s Tibet and Pakistan.
It was found wedged in among more than 100 bones that were probably deposited by a river that exited a cliff.
After three years of anatomical comparisons with other fossils, and using DNA data to build a family tree, the team is convinced the creature was a separate species.
Among modern big cats, its closest relation is the snow leopard.
The weight of evidence suggests that central or northern Asia was where Pantherinae originated, some 16 million years ago, according to the team’s paper in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
They may have lived in a vast mountain refuge, formed by the uplifting Himalayas, feeding on equally remarkable species such as the Tibetan blue sheep.
They then dispersed into Southeast Asia, evolving into the clouded leopard, tiger and snow leopard lineages. Later movements across continents saw them evolve into jaguars and lions.
The split with Felinae — a group that includes cougars, lynxes and domestic cats — was about 6 million years ago.
The newly discovered felid has been called Panthera blytheae, after Blythe Haaga, “the snow leopard-loving daughter” of a couple who support the museum in LA, the university said.
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