Nimravs

I couldn’t help but look up Nimravidae; the name reminded me of ‘nimrods’, which of course have nothing to do with Nimravidae. Naturally, I didn’t know that until I looked it up.

The Nimravidae were a cat-like creature whose fossils have been found in North America and Eurasia. They are sometimes called ‘false saber-toothed cats’. They existed from about 40.4 million years ago to 7.2 million years ago, spanning some 33.2 million years.

It is thought that the ancestors of nimravids and cats diverged from a common ancestor about 50 million years ago. Nimravid diversity appears to have peaked about 28 million years ago before the family began a slow descent into extinction. This diversity was apparent in the size and shape of their teeth, as well as the size of the body. Some nimravidae were the size of modern lions, and they had various other smaller sizes down to the size of a small bobcat. Their legs and tails were proportionally shorter than those of true cats.

When nimravid first appeared, the global climate was warm and wet, but it trended cooler and drier shortly after that. This meant the lush forests were transforming to scrub and open woodland, where the nimravids flourished. North America and Asia were connected at the time, and they inhabited both. Europe was more of a cluster of islands rather than a continent at the time, but there must have been some land bridges, for the nimravids also found their way there.

Still later, the woodlands were replaced by savanna in North America and Asia, and the nimravids in those areas died out. Portions of humid forests continued in Europe for a time, but when those died out in the late Miocene, so did the rest of the nimravids.

One has to wonder if the saber-tooth tiger that Fred Flintstone put out of the house every evening was really a saber-tooth tiger or actually a nimravidae.

On second thought, there may be a tenuous connection between ‘nimrod’ and ‘nimravidae’. The dictionary tells me that ‘nimrod’ refers to a person who is good at hunting. As a carnivorous species, the nimravidae had to be good at hunting. Now I wonder if that influenced whoever named this family of creatures. Or what exactly does ‘nimravidae’ mean in whatever language they used to construct this name?

  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimravidae

https://www.britannica.com/animal/Nimravidae