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

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Not sure how this applies to big cats specifically, but before DNA testing a large part of understanding evolution also came from the fossil record. This is why it’s so huge when we find new fossils – they give us a look into the past where we can potentially see a common ancestor of two modern species, or we can see how their anatomy changed over time

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