If you've ever lived with a cat, you've probably received a painful chomp from your beloved furball's pointy canines at least once.
But 42 million years ago, your kitty's teeth would have looked very different: Evolution was only just honing the teeth of cat-like animals to a deadly sharp tip for piercing and shredding flesh.A new paper has described one of the earliest known cat-like predators in the west coast of North America, giving us new information about these ancient predators and the evolution of modern carnivores.
"Today the ability to eat an all-meat diet, also called hypercarnivory, isn't uncommon. Tigers do it, polar bears can do it. If you have a house cat, you may even have a hypercarnivore at home. But 42 million years ago, mammals were only just figuring out how to survive on meat alone,""One big advance was to evolve specialized teeth for slicing flesh – which is something we see in this newly described specimen.