Felidae

:For the novel by Akif Pirin?ci, see Felidae (novel).

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Felinae

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Pantherinae

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Acinonychinae

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Machairodontinae (extinct)

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All cats are members of the family Felidae. A genetic anomaly that prevents them from tasting sweetness http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0010003may be responsible for felines being the most strictly carnivorous of the nine families in the order Carnivora. The cats' closest relatives are thought to be the other families in their branch of the carnivore evolutionary tree: the civets, hyenas, and mongooses. The first felids emerged during the Eocene, about 40 million years ago. The most familiar feline is the domestic cat, which first became associated with humans between 7000 and 4000 years ago. Its wild relatives still live in Africa and western Asia, although habitat destruction has restricted their range.

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Other well-known members of the cat family include big cats such as the lion, tiger, leopard, jaguar, and cheetah (which despite its size, appears to be descended from the small cats), and other wild cats such as the lynx, puma, and bobcat.

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Family: :This article is about the human domestic group. For other uses, see Family (disambiguation)....

Order: Order (from Latin ordo "row, rank, series, arrangement", Old French ordre from the Latin accusative, ordinem, attested in English from the 1220s). The word conveys a notion of "a system of parts subject to certain uniform, established ranks or proportions", an idea very central to scholastic thoug...

Eocene: The Eocene epoch (56-34 mya) is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Palaeogene period in the Cenozoic era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Paleocene epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene epoch. The start of the Eocene is marked by the emergence of t...