Dogs, loyal and caring; cats, quiet and elegant. As the leaders of the pet world, cats and Wang Xingren have always been deeply influenced by the public... cosset.
But, although today's cats and dogs are under the same roof and have to serve the same master, they are a pair of outright wrongdoers. Most of the cat owners and dog owners are deeply touched by this.
Although they are now able to get along with humans, the innate hatred between them has always existed. Dogs and cats are in the streets, homes, and downtowns, chasing and killing, dueling, losing both, and dispersing everywhere.
Maybe you really don't know that the feud and the dog clan have been feuding and loving each other for tens of millions of years, so let's take a look at the origin between cats and dogs and their history of grievances.
In daily life, our common cats and dogs are different in size, appearance, habits, and genera, and there are huge differences. In our perception, they are clearly two unrelated species.
But this is not the case, cats and dogs actually come from the same ancestor. This sounds like in the Korean idol drama, the male and female protagonists have an indissoluble relationship in the process of loving and killing each other, but in the end, they find that the other party is a long-lost brother and sister.
The ancestors who represent the common appearance of cats and dogs today lived 40 million to 55 million years ago, and are a small insectivorous beast living in North America, and this animal between cats and dogs is the ancient cat beast.
In addition to cats and dogs, the later emergence of bears, foxes, weasels, raccoons, wolves, etc., all evolved from this animal.
However, as soon as carnivorous orders appeared, cats and dogs split into two main factions.
The relationship between them also changed from the same door to the enemy, and began more than 40 million years of enmity and entanglement. Just like the rivers on both sides of the Hengduan Mountain Range, they have been running for thousands of years, but they have not been in contact with each other, which makes people sigh endlessly.
As pets, cats and dogs are the most common species in the feline and canine families, they live around people, show two very different tempers, and have very different ways of surviving in the wild.
The cat, the embodiment of agility, raids prey with dexterous movements, always acts alone, and is a pure carnivore.
Dogs are domesticated by wolves, "You know what? There are no dogs in the world, but more people have become dogs, inheriting the genes of wolves, is a symbol of endurance, tireless tracking targets, like collaborative hunting, eat meat and eat vegetarian.
Such a vastly different survival strategy represents a protracted battle for the top predators.
The first top predators to rise in this war were the cat-shaped suborder Cat Hunters, who appeared in dense forests 40 million years ago, spread all the way down the island chain to Eurasia, and reached their peak 28 million years ago.
It has huge canine teeth that protrude from the mouth, resembling a later saber-toothed tiger. At the time, teeth like these were the characteristic equipment of the cat-shaped suborder specifically for large prey.
The suborder Canis early divided into two branches, one remained in the forest and maintained a ferret-like form, including bears, ferrets, raccoons, etc., and the other bravely went to the meadows and wastelands, and developed into a canine family 40 million years ago.
As the climate of the Miocene (23 million to 5.33 million years ago) became cooler, forests continued to degrade into grasslands, and running canids quickly flourished.
Although cats and dogs from the same ancestors ostensibly parted ways and lived separately, the competition between them showed no signs of abating, but became more and more intense.
The climate in the Pliocene (5.3 million to 2.588 million years ago) was getting colder, and the Pleistocene even erupted into an ice age.
The northern temperate big cats, especially saber-toothed tigers, still stubbornly ambush their prey, slitting their throats with giant canine teeth. Canines, on the other hand, are becoming more and more adept at group collaboration, and have long-distance raids to besiege animals such as bison and wild horses.
The end result of this struggle was that the subfamily saber-toothed tigers of the feline family became the last predators with saber-toothed teeth, losing to animals such as canines and gray wolves as large prey decreased.
After thousands of years of territorial struggle, the spheres of influence of cats and canines have been settled.
Felines still occupy the top of the food chain in tropical and temperate forests, continuing their elitist solitude and raids. The canines occupied the more expansive grasslands, promoting their collectivist siege and hunting.
Where the two overlap, in the savannahs of the Old Route, they are ruled by the cats that most resemble dogs. For example......
lion
Although lions are felines, lions work together to catch animals in the same way as canines
hyena
Hyenas, originally members of the cat-shaped suborder, have completely lived a dog life today
To this day, the competition between cats and dogs continues, but the purpose of competition has changed from survival to the most cute pet.
Because dogs evolved faster, dogs have been human companions as early as 15,000 years ago, while cats have gone through much longer and harder efforts than dogs, leaving the wild world about 9,000 years ago.
Because of this, dogs have more advantages over cats, and dogs always win more than lose in various cat and dog wars.
Cats and dogs have struggled for thousands of years to survive. Until one day they met us, the human "covenant", so tempting the cat and the dog, finally they chose to believe us, signed a lifelong master-servant contract, gave up the fangs used for predation, suppressed the inner beast, and became our partner. They became docile and cute, and never returned on the road of "cuteness".
This article is transferred from the WeChat public account: Geographical Records