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
Long before even taxonomy, people were very good in pattern recognition. Look at all the birds and frogs/toads that the long used common names already mirror their taxon.
If something was unclear, anatomy did the job. There are many anatomical features unique to cats.
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