Comparing Cats: A Discussion of Similarities & Differences

[Sully]

"These features scale differently with body size; small cats have relatively larger brains and eyes, but smaller jaw muscles than large cats. The negative allometry of brain and eye size is common among mammals ( Jerison 1973) and the positive allometry of the feeding apparatus scales as expected. The braincase of smaller cats provides sufficient surface area for the attachment of the temporalis and masseter muscles, but as skull dimensions increase, the braincase surface area increases more slowly than jaw muscle volume for equivalent scaling. Therefore, larger cats evolved prominent sagittal and occipital crests for additional surface area for jaw muscle attachments (Fig. 3.8). However, the skulls of small cats do not simply scale up to the sizes of large cats (Werdelin 1983), which may reflect developmental modularity, but this needs to be tested."

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