FLIGHT & CATS

[darren.naish@port.ac.uk]

I think I agree with Tim as goes the evolution of flight and flight-
related structures. One of the most interesting things about the recent 
Richard Prum work on feather evolution is that the morphology of his 
earliest proto-feathers are not dependent on a functional framework - 
viz., the earliest proto-feathers sensu Prum are not hypothesised with 
either flight or insulation in mind. They could have had advantages to 
either.

As for cats...

> I think leopards would qualify as arboreal.  I'm not familiar with the
> eclogy of the Felidae, but some other cat species may spend a lot of
> their time in trees as well.

Though the term 'arboreal' is sometimes used in the literature for 
leopards they're strictly speaking not arboreal as they don't live in the 
trees - they hunt/interact etc on the ground. Clouded leopards 
(_Neofelis_) and margays (_Leopardus weidi_), both of which do hunt 
in the trees and have rotatable ankles that allow them to hang upside 
down and stuff, are usually termed arboreal in the cat literature. 
However, major major grey area and these definitions are all 
subjective. Pretty much all cats are scansorial - even lions and cheetahs 
(both of which can climb trees, albeit often with difficulty and only in 
some parts of their range). 

> What we need is a ground-to-trees (or trees-to-ground) equivalent of 
> "amphibious" (water-to-land, or  vice versa).

Doesn't scansorial cover this?

DARREN NAISH 
PALAEOBIOLOGY RESEARCH GROUP
School of Earth & Environmental Sciences
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