Fossil Found in Tibet Suggests Big Cats Originated in Asia

Paleontologists have found fossilized remains of a big cat skull in the remote regions of Tibet. The discovery supports the idea that big cats such as tigers and lions might have originated in Central Asia and not Africa, as was previously believed.

Researchers have named the extinct species Panthera blytheae. Its skull fragments are about 4.1 to 5.95 million years old, BBC reports.

"This cat is a sister of living snow leopards - it has a broad forehead and a short face. But it's a little smaller - the size of clouded leopards," said lead author Dr Jack Tseng of the University of Southern California, reports BBC."This ties up a lot of questions we had on how these animals evolved and spread throughout the world.

Evolution of the big cats has always been a mystery to biologists. There are very few fossil records of these felines. The newly discovered skull strengthens the idea that the ancient relative of tigers, lions and leopards roamed the Himalayan region much before than their African sister species.

The latest find is also a kind of a missing link. DNA analysis had earlier found that big cats split from the Felinae subfamily- including cougars, domestic cats and lynxes- about 6.37 million years ago. The existence of P. Blytheae shakes up the evolutionary tree of the cat family and researchers now estimate that the big cats might have branched-out between 10 and 11 million years ago.

The study team including Dr Tseng and his wife Juan Liu - also a paleontologist- found the fossils during an expedition to Zanda Basin in southwestern Tibet in 2010. They found several bone fragments on a cliff along with a crushed skull.

Interestingly, the latest study shows how little cats have changed over millions of years.

"The reason they don't change is that they are so good at what they do that they don't need to change," Julie Meachen, a paleontologist at Des Moines University in Iowa, who was not involved in the study told Livescience. "They're just really effective killers of prey right from the get-go."

The study is reported in the journal in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B.