The ‘cat gap’ in feline evolution

According to Wikipedia,
“The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 million to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America.”

This came as news. I’m too often the last to know.

“All modern carnivorans, including cats, evolved from miacoids, which existed from approximately 66 to 33 million years ago. There were other earlier cat-like species but Proailurus (meaning “before the cat”; also called “Leman’s Dawn Cat”), which appeared about 30 million years ago, is generally considered the first “true cat”.

Miacoids, like Miacis (Fig 1), extend back to the Late Paleocene and nest as pre-bats + pre-primates in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2135 taxa, subset Fig 2). The clade Carnivora is a sister clade, just as primitive among placentals, so miacoids are very close.

Two new taxa entered the LRT,
Proailurus and its larger, more famous sister, Smilodon (Fig 1). Many scores were updated and a few taxa moved around to accommodate those updates. Among the changes, two old sabertoothed taxa, Machaeroides (Fig 1) and Stylinodon moved in with the two new sabertooth taxa, none of them related to cats, tigers and lions.