Walk on the Wild Side: The Story of Illinois Cats
Introduction
This is the story of cats in Illinois. It includes both the wild cats native to this land and the newcomer, the domestic cat. This cat story focuses on both their role as predators and their interactions with people. Scientists at the Illinois State Museum have played a part in understanding the history of cats in Illinois and the Midwest.
The cat family, Felidae, originated over 25 million years ago in Eurasia. The earliest cat, Proailurus, was about the size of a bobcat and a good climber. Today, 41 species of cats live around the world. They live in habitats ranging from tropical jungles to snowy mountains to arid deserts. The smallest species, the rusty-spotted cat and the black-footed cat, weigh less than six pounds as adults. The largest species, the Siberian tiger and the African lion, can reach 600 pounds. In the past, some cats were even larger. The American lion, an extinct cat from the Ice Ages, weighed over 1,100 pounds.
People have been fascinated with cats since early times. This human connection crosses many cultures and places. The earliest record of this is seen in European cave paintings and carved figures of lions. They can be dated to around 30,000 years ago. Around 4,000 years ago, cats became common in Egyptian art and religion. Native Americans in the southwestern United States carved mountain lions into rock, creating petroglyphs, over 700 years ago.
Cats are an important part of our lives today. The domestic cat is a common pet around the world. They are a popular subject for artists, writers, and cartoonists, and they often appear in social media. While felines are well-liked, many wild cats are negatively impacted by people. Worldwide threats to wild cats include destruction of the places they live, being killed because they are thought to be dangerous, and being hunted for their fur.
What Makes a Cat a Cat?
From the extinct saber-tooth cat to the “house panther” in your living room, all cats share many traits. Cats are hypercarnivores. They require a large amount of meat in their diet, which they get by preying mostly on vertebrate animals. Many of cats’ specialized features are related to their skills as hunters. Cats’ eyes are large, forward-facing, and sensitive to low-light conditions. This helps them see better at night when they are most active. Their skeletons are flexible, with long limbs and retractable claws for stalking and capturing their food. Their molar teeth are modified to form slicing blades. This is unique to cats compared to other meat-eating animals. The wide variety of coat color patterns seen in cats helps them blend into different habitats and avoid detection by their prey. All these elements combine to make cats extremely efficient predators.
'MEOW'
Cool Cats of the Ice Ages
"The smallest feline is a masterpiece."
-Leonardo da Vinci
Scimitar Cat (Homotherium serum)Friesenhahn Cave, Bexar County, Texas Range: Northern Africa, Eurasia, and North America Pliocene to Pleistocene epochs (4 million to 11,700 years ago)Plaster cast of skull
Saber-toothed Cat (Smilodon fatalis)Range: North and South AmericaPleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) Plaster casts of skull and lower jaw
During the Ice Ages (the Pleistocene epoch, 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), large cats roamed North America. Now extinct, some have modern-day relatives.
The saber-toothed cats and scimitar cats are part of a group of large cats with no modern descendants. The saber-toothed cat, Smilodon fatalis, is one of the best-known predators of the Ice Ages. These big cats lived in forests and woodlands. They preyed on large herbivores (plant-eaters) like tapirs, deer, llama-like mammals, and peccaries (relatives of pigs). They used their powerful front legs to grab and pull down prey so they could deliver a killing bite with their enlarged, blade-like canine teeth.
The scimitar cat, Homotherium serum, had enlarged, flattened canine teeth with serrated edges for slicing. They had relatively short hind legs like modern hyenas. Their bodies were made for running in open grasslands. A cave in Texas preserved the skeletal remains of scimitar cats and young mammoths. This suggests these big cats preyed on the small mammoths and dragged them into the cave to eat.
The Pleistocene jaguar, also known as the giant jaguar, Panthera onca augusta, lived across much of North America. In fact, jaguars persisted up until the early 1800s in some places. Jaguars today only reach into northern Mexico and, at times, into the southwestern United States. These Pleistocene cats were 15-20% bigger than modern jaguars, with larger feet, longer limbs, and bigger teeth. Like jaguars today, the giant jaguar lived in forested habitats. They did not live in the same habitats with other big cats like the American lion or saber-toothed cats.
How Do We Identify Animal Tracks in the Fossil Record?
Animal footprints can be tricky to identify. This is especially true if the species that made them is extinct. We can turn to living animals for clues. For example, members of the cat family, Felidae, have retractable claws. Generally, there are no claw marks in their tracks. Members of the dog family, Canidae, do leave claw marks.
Scientists from the Illinois State Museum worked on a project studying fossil tracks from large cats found in Missouri caves. They made plaster casts of tracks from modern big cats in zoos to compare with the fossil tracks. One set of cat tracks found in a cave in south-central Missouri (Douglas County) was larger than modern tiger and lion, as well as the extinct saber-toothed cat. Based on this, the tracks were identified as American lion, the largest cat species from North America. A different set of cat tracks, discovered in Berome Moore Cave in Perry County, Missouri, were similar in size to both the jaguar and saber-toothed cat. Fossil remains of jaguar were found in the same cave, indicating that the tracks are most likely from the same species.
Wild Cats Are Survivors
Today’s native cats of North America are survivors of long-term changes in the environment and human impacts. Mountain lions (Puma concolor) and jaguars (Panthera onca) are the only two “big cat” species that survived through the Ice Ages (Pleistocene epoch) to today. Fossil records for both species go back nearly two million years.
Diet played a key role in the survival of these cats. Mountain lions are generalist predators. They eat many types of prey, even bones and carrion (dead animals) left behind by other animals. In comparison, saber-toothed cats ate only certain animals, while American lions preferred fresh, tender meat. Modern day jaguars eat smaller prey than other cats of the same size, like leopards. Switching to smaller prey meant jaguars still had a variety of food choices when larger prey animals decreased in numbers or went extinct. Having a flexible diet helped mountain lions and jaguars survive the extinctions that impacted other large meat-eaters.
The Wide-Ranging Mountain Lion
"Cats are a mysterious kind of folk."
-Walter Scott
Mountain lions are also called cougars, pumas, or catamounts. These cats have the widest range of any mammal in the Americas, other than humans. They are found from northwestern Canada to the tip of Patagonia in South America. They live in many different habitats including forests, mountains, and deserts. However, they have been greatly affected by changes and loss of their habitats, hunting by people, and declining numbers of the animals they eat, like deer. Over the past 250 years, mountain lions have been nearly wiped out in midwestern and eastern parts of North America. In Illinois, mountain lions were extirpated (locally extinct) by the 1870s. By the early 1900s, they were gone from the Midwest.
Today, mountain lions are making a comeback due to state and federal protections. Genetic studies and other research show these cats are moving back to the Midwest from healthy populations in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Most of the animals moving east are young males looking to find their own territories. Since the first documented mountain lion in Illinois in 2000, there have been at least nine confirmed reports of mountain lions in the state. Mountain lions are protected by law in Illinois as are black bears and gray wolves, but they are not breeding in the state.
The "Comeback Cat"
Bobcats (Lynx rufus) and their northern relative the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) survived through the Ice Ages. They lived in small regions called refugia that had a more comfortable climate. The species expanded to today’s broad ranges over the last 10,000–12,000 years, as the ice sheets retreated and habitats they could live in increased.
The bobcat gets its name from its short tail. These cats are secretive and usually live alone. They mostly hunt at night and prey on birds and small mammals, like rabbits, squirrels, and mice. Historically, bobcats lived from southern Canada through central Mexico. They have been nearly removed from the Midwest and eastern North America. Bobcat numbers in Illinois decreased starting in the 1800s. This was due to over-hunting as well as the harvesting of trees from their preferred woodland habitats. By the late 1800s, bobcats were extirpated (locally extinct) from northern and central parts of the state. They were almost entirely gone from Illinois by the mid-1900s. Nevertheless, these cats persisted, primarily in southern Illinois. Bobcats were included on the Illinois state list of threatened and endangered species from 1977 to 1999. Today their numbers are recovering and bobcats are found in every Illinois county.
The Cat That Took Over the World
First Steps
Fifteen to twenty-thousand years ago, tabby-striped wildcats lived across Africa, Asia, and through much of Europe. With the beginnings of agriculture, 11,000 –12,000 years ago in the Middle East, wandering groups of people created permanent settlements. Mice and rats were drawn to stored grains in these new villages. The local wildcats soon followed, attracted by a steady source of food. People let the cats stay because they were useful at killing the rodent pests that were eating their food.
Unlike dogs, as the relationship between cats and humans continued, people did not breed them for specific tasks. The body shape of cats stayed very similar to their wild ancestors. It is difficult to tell from bones alone when the change from wild to domesticated cat happened.
"I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat."
-Edgar Allan Poe
Connecting With Cats
The oldest known connection between people and the domestic cat is a 9,500-year-old burial on the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The skeletons of a person and a cat were found buried close together surrounded by burial objects. In Egypt, artistic images of cats and mummified cat bodies became common around 4,000 years ago. Cats were so important in Egyptian culture they were named an official deity, the goddess Bastet.
As agricultural methods spread, cats followed. Genetic studies show cats from the Middle East moving into southeastern Europe around 6,400 years ago. Despite a ban on taking cats from Egypt, genetics show cats moving from that area into southwest Asia around 2,800 years ago. Cats travelled with people along trade routes by land and by sea. They served as mousers on ships that carried grain and goods around the Mediterranean and to more distant lands. Cat remains dating to the 7th and 8th Centuries CE (Common Era) have been found at a Viking trading port in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea and along the Silk Road in Asia at a site in Kazakhstan.
Mountain lion upper (maxilla) and lower (mandible) jaw fragments that were altered by Hopewell people have been recovered from seven Illinois sites. The object on display is from the upper jaw. The bone was cut and a hole drilled so it could be attached to another object. Other parts of the skeleton from these large cats are rarely found at archaeological sites. This suggests mountain lions were occasionally hunted but were not a regular part of people’s diet. Admiration and respect for big cats and other carnivores (meat-eaters) may have kept them from being regularly hunted.
On loan from the University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology
This Gulf Coast conch shell gorget (neck ornament) was found in a Late Woodland site in southwest Missouri. However, it is believed to date to the earlier Middle Woodland (Hopewell) period. It was saved, selected, and buried by Late Woodland people. The jaguar is portrayed in a realistic manner and has a three-pronged “speech symbol” coming from its mouth. Archaeologists originally thought the jaguar image showed contact between Hopewell and Mesoamerican people. However, the historic range of the jaguar includes portions of the Midwest and Great Lakes. As there are no other objects showing Mesoamerican influence in their style, it is more likely the jaguar gorget is of Hopewell origin.
Bobcat effigy pipes appear in multiple Ohio Hopewell sites. This pipe is unique for its depiction of a human with cat-like ears and facial markings. This suggests a special relationship between bobcats and humans and reflects the ritual beliefs of Hopewell people. As animal totems (symbols) for certain clan or family groups, large cats were an important part of ceremonial life.
This skeleton of a juvenile bobcat from the Elizabeth Mounds site was originally identified as a “puppy.” It was reexamined by Illinois State Museum scientists studying dog remains at the Research & Collections Center. They realized the bones belonged to a cat because the skeleton—especially the teeth—is very different from a dog. The bobcat was compared with reference skeletons in the Museum’s faunal (animal) collection. The archaeologists determined the Elizabeth Mounds bobcat was between four and seven months old when it died. The bobcat kitten, wearing a necklace of shell beads and effigy bear canine teeth, was given its own burial. It is possible the kitten was orphaned early in life, then found and tamed by humans. Without its mother, the bobcat was unable to survive. This is the only known example of a wild cat being buried like a human. Archaeology magazine named it one of the “Top 10 Discoveries of 2015.”
This young bobcat’s bones have not finished growing. The ends of the bones are not fused (completely joined) to the centers. They are separate, small pieces. Illinois State Museum scientists used this skeleton from the research collection to figure out the age of the young bobcat from the Elizabeth Mounds archaeological site. This bobcat skeleton has a similar amount of growth as the one found at Elizabeth Mounds. The two animals are close in age, about four to seven months old.
Cats, Cats, Everywhere
Some distinct cat breeds, like Siamese, Turkish Angora, and Norwegian Forest Cat, developed over time from isolated cat populations. Most modern cat breeds were only established in the last 150 years. In that time there has been an explosion of different color patterns and fur lengths. The Cat Fanciers Association of North America recognizes 45 breeds, but that is only part of the variety seen in over 600 million domestic cats worldwide. From the outskirts of farming villages 10,000 years ago to today’s internet stars, cats have found ways to succeed and spread around the globe, all due to their close connection with the lives of people.
