DNA testing is relatively new so I assume it wasn’t that. Did some scientists just go out into the wild and observe lions behaving like cats and think to themselves “I bet they’re related!”, or did they have some other way of figuring it out?
**EDIT:** By the sounds of things they just looked at them and guessed. Luckily they guessed right! Can you imagine if we’d spent all this time calling them ‘big cats’ only to have DNA evidence prove that they’re completely unrelated? 😂
In: Biology
They have a lot of anatomical similarities. There are times when we made mistakes about relationships, like hyenas look like dogs, but they’re more closely related to cats. Before DNA we also had fossils, if you find a likely common ancestor and can date the ground they were found in, you get a pretty good idea of how the diverged over time.
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