Podcast 325 - The Curse of the Not Cat

Listeners, I'm going to level with you. This podcast is cursed. Not because of the content, which is mostly a pretty straight forward discussion about two papers that look into the fossil record of Nimravids (early cats that are not true cats). No, this podcast is cursed because the file refused to be compiled, crashing Audacity 3 times and each time corrupting the save file. The fact that any mp3 file was able to be compiled at all was a minor miracle. I can only assume that this means this podcast data has gained sentience and did not want to be born. I have no control over what happens when this mp3 file gets released into the internet… so anyways enjoy the episode!   Up-Goer Five (Curt Edition): The friends talk about two papers that both look at things we can see in the hard parts of animals that are like cats but are not cats and use those hard parts to figure out what these not cats are doing. These papers looks at different not cats and try and see what types of food they would eat and how they would get that food. Turns out that many of these not cats were doing things that are not the same as the cats we have today.   References: Castellanos, Miguel. "Hunting types in North American Eocene–Oligocene carnivores and implications for the 'cat-gap'." Journal of Mammalian Evolution 32.2 (2025): 25. Jiangzuo, Qigao, et al. "A new ecomorph of Nimravidae, and the early macrocarnivorous niche exploration in Carnivora." Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 292.2059 (2025).