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 DNA was identified, it was understood that convergent evolution (two species developing an analogous feature independently, i.e. not simply both inheriting that feature from a common ancestor) is relatively rare. Knowing nothing else, if two animals have whiskers, it’s more likely that both of those animals inherited those whiskers from the same ancestor, rather than two separate species both lucking into the random genetic changes necessary to make facial hairs function as sensory organs.
So once you observe that a house cat and a lion share nearly everything when it comes to adaptations (skeleton/musculature, instincts, sensory organs, etc.), it is far more reasonable to assume that both came from the same cat-like ancestor (which branched into two species of different sizes) than to assume that evolution “invented” what is basically the same animal twice, totally independently of each other.
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