Colours of Wildlife: Patriofelis
Created | Updated Feb 19, 2017
Patriofelis
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
Yet another prehistoric special! I hope you folks aren't minding these. It is a big ambition of mine to create reconstructions of as many prehistoric critters as possible – while still keeping the quality high. I especially want to focus on prehistoric mammals. There's so much about dinosaurs in the media, but the old mammals were to me just as fascinating, if not even more so. And I find it valuable to know where the biodiversity that we have today, came from … and also to have a good idea of the biodiversity we had in the past. It gives one a sense of the 'potential' of Life itself for producing new and unique forms – that work! Throughout history, there have been a great many success stories, species that were widespread and abundant and that reigned for thousands to a few millions of years. But all eventually disappear and are replaced by something else. This shouldn't make us feel sad … the new species essentially are just working towards the same cause as the older ones: filling the Earth with abundant and interesting life!
So what we have here, is another ancient success story, though its likes are long gone today. This is Patriofelis, 'Father Cat' or 'Father of the Cats'. Yet, it is not a cat – not even remotely! It is a relative of that other ancient cat-like thing I treated recently, Oxyaena. Patriofelis lived later than Oxyaena, in the Middle Eocene, around 45 million years ago. Its fossils were also found in North America. That doesn't mean Oxyaena was the ancestor of Patriofelis, but they were in the same group – Patriofelis' ancestors would likely have been similar to Oxyaena.
It's difficult in palaeontology to find the exact, actual ancestors of anything. Only perhaps one species in a hundred (my own rough estimate, indeed an estimate that can never be precise since we're speculating about what we don't and cannot know for sure) is preserved as a fossil form, since fossilisation is actually a very rare event. So if not Oxyaena itself, the ancestor of Patriofelis might be one of the 99 other species similar to Oxyaena whose fossils we haven't found and may never find. Bear this in mind as well whenever there's talk about a 'missing link' – whether between apes and humans, or between anything and anything else. We're missing technically about 99 out of 100 of all links, simply because fossilisation is rare as it is. But we also have found a great many links. Everything is technically a link between something that came before and something that comes later (unless it's a dead end – extinct without descendants). There is not 'a' link between anything and anything else – there are scores of links, hundreds or thousands of links, and we're missing most of them. We're missing all the species that haven't made it into the fossil record, or whose fossils we haven't found yet – and there are plenty of things whose fossils we won't ever find since they are not there. All of them are missing links – so we're speaking of thousands or millions of missing links. We still don't know for sure how many species have actually existed on this planet since the origin of life. Heck, we don't even know how many species exist on it now. We don't even have a ballpark figure. Estimates by biologists vary from a few million species, to over a hundred million species – a pretty big range. Most of those species are tiny, bacteria or microbes or insects or crustaceans or other invertebrates. But they, too, are important and represent a very big realm of biodiversity. When it comes to what we like to think of as 'higher' creatures like mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish, we have a somewhat better idea of the number, but even that is still in flux – we keep discovering new species. Many are not actual animals we are discovering anew, but animals we knew about but didn't realize that they constitute unique species; only by studying them more carefully we realize that they are indeed distinct from other, similar animals, enough so to warrant recognition as new species. But we are still finding wholly new species too. And don't even speak of plants! So all across the board we are only just scratching the surface in determining the present biodiversity of Earth – never even mind the past!
But speaking of the past: here we have old Patriofelis. Not only did it live a little later than Oxyaena, it was also much larger, about the size of the living jaguar. Like Oxyaena, it had a long body with short limbs and a stout tail. Its skull was long, low and short-muzzled, like that of a cat or otter. Indeed, the great palaeo-artist Charles Knight reconstructed Patriofelis as a giant otter-like thing, with webbed feet. This is perhaps not an implausible reconstruction, but there's no direct evidence I know of for Patriofelis being semi-aquatic. Its short, strong limbs would not have allowed it to run fast. Then again, this was not so much of a handicap, since at the time most of its prey was rather slow and lumbering as well. It might have been an ambush predator. It ought to have been a good climber, in spite of its size. Unlike cats, it walked with the soles of its front and hind feet flat on the ground. It didn't have retractile claws. Like most early predatory mammals, it likely used its head as its main weapon for attacking and catching its prey, making little use of its claws.
The Dawn of the Recent
The time during which Patriofelis lived, the middle Eocene period, was still one during which most of the Earth was warm and covered in forest. 'Eocene' means, roughly, 'the dawn of the recent'. That is to say, it was the time when the recent kind of life of Earth, dominated by mammals and birds, was establishing itself. The dinosaurs had died out 65 million years ago, so by Patriofelis' time, it was already about 20 million years into this new age. The Earth was changing: new mountains were forming and continents were breaking up. The Atlantic Ocean started as a narrow seaway dividing Africa from South America and Europe from North America; by the end of the Eocene this division was complete and animals could no longer easily be exchanged between these regions. In the south, Antarctica also broke away from South America. Once it took up its fixed position over the South Pole, ice started accumulating on it, which was a driver for cooler climates all over the planet. But the Eocene was still very warm. Ocean levels were high because there were no glaciers and ice caps; this means that some continental regions were separated by shallow seaways.
In the oceans, the first whales were appearing, descended from strange, medium-sized hoof mammals resembling both pigs and wolves. Crocodiles were still diverse and abundant and flourishing in the warm rivers and swamps; turtles and tortoises too abounded. As I've said in the article on Oxyaena, there were a great many kinds of birds, including a few large, flightless types that almost seemed like the 'second wind' of the dinosaurs, but which were eventually outcompeted by the more successful large mammals. Initially in the Eocene, life on all the continents was very similar, but as the continents divided and new seaways and mountain ranges formed, different regions became separated from each other and there arose different faunal 'provinces' across the Earth's surface, each province's living forms being unique and distinctive.
So the Eocene was the early, experimental phase of the 'Age of Mammals (and Birds, to give them their due)'. Patriofelis was still one of the 'old guard', the first wave of mammalian predators. It was an effective predator of the first wave of mammalian herbivores, which were large but rather unwieldy. But even in the middle Eocene the times were changing: the first representatives of fully-modern herbivores like horses, pigs, camels and deer were emerging, as were the first of the fully-modern carnivores, the group that now includes dogs, cats, bears and hyenas. Though these first moderns were all initially rather small and unspecialized, they had in their builds the features that later would make them outcompete the old forms like Patriofelis. As the world kept changing, the new types proved more versatile. Patriofelis was one of the last of its kind. The next geological period, the Oligocene, saw the transition from the ancient kind of mammals like Patriofelis, to a kind of fauna that would have been much more familiar to us. From there, mammals kept evolving, and the ensuing Miocene and Pliocene periods indeed saw an amazing flowering of forms, the evolutionary high point – a mammalian diversity far greater than what remains to us today. I hope to be telling you more about that in upcoming prehistoric specials.
