The Prehistoric Cat Thread- All cats minus sabercats

The compact, gnarled and knobbly specimen looks like a root of ginger. In fact, it’s 17,000-year-old puma poo, and it contains the oldest parasite DNA yet recorded.

The team of researchers behind the discovery say the finding not only confirms that the felines were prowling around the Andes towards the end of the last ice age, but reveals that they were infested with roundworm long before humans and their animals turned up.

“The common interpretation that the presence of [this roundworm parasite] in modern American wild carnivores is a consequence of their contact with domestic dogs or cats should no longer be assumed as the only possible explanation,” the scientists write.

Today, the puma, the jaguarundi and the cheetah are the only surviving species of the Puma linneage. The three species have in common a round skull, non-vertical, round pupil, 38 chromosomes and 30 teeth. The two first are more closely related to each other and ascribed to genus Puma, whereas the cheetah is more differentiated and thus kept in its own genus, Acinonyx

The origins of the linneage are not completely clear. It was thought once that cheetahs originated in America, but now fossils of Acinonyx have been found in Southern Africa which date back to the mid-late Pliocene, around 4-3 million years ago.

Other ancient cheetahs such as the giant Plio-Pleistocene Acinonyx pardiniensis, were very widespread in Africa and Eurasia but didn´t cross the Bering strait, which the ancestors of pumas did.

Fossils of pumas have been found in central Asia (Mongolia and Georgia) from the late Pliocene, 3.6 million years, but even older fossils are known from Africa and believed to belong to ancient members of the Puma linneage which strongly suggests the genus appeared in Africa.

At some point of the late Pliocene and/or early Pleistocene, ancestral pumas- including perhaps Puma (Viretailurus) pardoides, crossed into North America from Asia. Once there they gave rise to the Miracinonyx genus, which were cheetah-like and extremely fast runners, very similar to today's African cheetah. They also continued to spread southwards into South America. There, they gave rise to the modern puma (Puma concolor) and to Puma pumoides, the ancestor of today's jaguarundi (Puma jagouaroundi).

After evolving in South America, both species of Puma (the puma and the jaguarundi) crossed back into North America and becoming established there, until climate change during the late Pleistocene caused the extinction of the megafauna around 11.000 years ago. Around 80% of the continent's large vertebrates went extinct, from giant ground sloths, mammoths and mastodonts, horses and camels, to large carnivores including cats, and the puma among them.

The surprising genetic uniformity in most of today's North American pumas (aka cougars or mountain lions) shows that they are all the result of a re-colonization, from a population in central and eastern South America.

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Today, the puma is the widest ranging cat latitudinally, being found from the Canadian Yukon to southernmost Patagonia.