How did they figure out that ‘big cats’ (lions, tigers, leopards, etc.) were actually related to normal-sized cats?

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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

18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

They didn’t guess, they inferred. There’s a lot that goes into phylogeny. Behaviour, anatomy and physiology, homologous and analogous structures, breeding and embryo development and before DNA biochemistry was important.

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