The Undying Lands, which until that time had been part of the World, were removed forever from the reach of mortal Men, though the Cats could still sail West and come there, if they would. It is to the Undying Lands that the White Ship sails at the end of 3rd Age (25 million years ago).
I like to think that the cats went off-world when the cat oracles foresaw that the age of man was coming.
I suppose this doesn't fit on Wikipedia, but obviously one possible cause is that Cats are aliens from a planet abut 3.4 million lightyears away, and during that 7 million year period, all the cats left Earth suddenly because their planet needed them [1]. They used a near-light-speed vehicle to get there, solved the crisis on their home planet, then returned to continue their stewardship of Earth, and then the vehicle flew back.
It appears there are no galaxies between 3.26 and 3.9 ly away. Maybe they're from Andromeda at 2.5~3 ly, and took some time to accelerate and decelerate.
Got me reading up on Carnivora. Interesting, I never knew that walruses and seals are so closely related to canines and felines! Then again, I never studied biology, so there are no doubt plenty more similarly well-known fauna family ties that I never learned about.
Anyone who has met a sea lion up close knows that the name 'sea dog' was wasted on sharks. An error which has been corrected in the mascot of a few minor sports clubs.
They're not big cats, they're only feliforms. Big cats belong to felidae. But no, it's not commonly known that hyenas are more closely related to cats than to dogs.
I assumed this was about the European (maybe only English?) practice of keeping mummified cats in a gap in your house to keep away witches. Dunno what topic is more grim, millions of potentially catless years or a mummified cat in your walls.
Do you have a source on the fact that this was done intentionally?
I only knew that cats go into hiding then they feel their end is near, that they do this on their own. Thus most "cat is missing" posters actually mean their cat died but kept it secret from its humans.
I found a mummified cat when renovating a house in Northern France. Always thought the cat must have eaten rat poison/poisoned rat and therefor mummified. How are these preserved? It didn't look embalmed in anyway.
I tried to look up an answer, the first page suggests they just stuck them in there. Then I decided I've seen my fill of dried cats for today so someone else can look it up.
If this interests you, then I highly recommend The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives by Turner and Anton [1]. The illustrations of ancient cat species are almost forensic in style and realism, showing details of muscle and tissue placement, and the text relates a number of fascinating fossil stories, for example a sinkhole into which a sabertooth cat and its prey tumbled, presumably while wrestling to the death, to be entombed together for megayears.
One of the few instances I recall of being swayed by "intelligent design" theories as a lad was what they called the "lack of transitional fossil records". I forget most of it because I tend to believe organized worship of a figure is probably nothing but a cult for power and control. But it supposed that something like a bat would have to have evolved wings, according to Darwin. Then it must mean that it evolved from a mammal that didn't have wings - so then why are there not fossils of weird bat-rats?
For all I know, there are in fact such fossils, or any of about 15 other explanations, because the book which I was being homeschooled with, "Biology from a Christian Perspective" or similar, also tried to disprove evolution unironically by describing how many monkeys it would take over a few million years to have randomly pounded out the Bible.
Anyway, the cat gap is proof that God hated kittens.
There's a simpler explanation for the rareness of bat fossils:
"Bat fossils are extremely rare. Ancient bats, like their modern counterparts, were small and fragile, and they tended to live in tropical habitats, where decay occurs very rapidly. Just about the only way a bat can become fossilized is if it dies in a place where it is swiftly covered with sediment that protects it from scavengers and microorganisms alike."
However a transitional bat fossil was discovered around 2000, so probably after your school book was written:
"Onychonycteris, however, has a combination of archaic and modern traits that make it exactly the sort of transitional creature evolutionary biologists have longed for.
"We chose the genus name Onychonycteris (“clawed bat”) because the fossil displays claws on all five fingers, just as its terrestrial predecessors did. The presence of these claws is not the only feature of Onychonycteris that recalls nonflying mammals. Most bats have very long forearms and tiny hind limbs. Onychonycteris, however, has proportionately shorter forearms and proportionately longer hind limbs than those of other bats. Compared with other mammals, the limb proportions of Onychonycteris are intermediate between those of all previously known bats (including Icaronycteris) and those of arboreal mammals that rely heavily on their forelimbs for locomotion, such as sloths and gibbons. These animals hang from branches much of the time as they climb around in the trees. Perhaps bats evolved from arboreal ancestors that used a similar form of locomotion.
"Despite these primitive limb features, other aspects of the anatomy of Onychonycteris indicate that it was capable of powered flight. Its long fingers would have supported wing membranes, and robust clavicles (collarbones) would have helped anchor the forelimbs to the body. Meanwhile a wide rib cage and a keeled sternum would have supported large flight muscles, and a faceted scapula would have secured other specialized, flight-related muscles."
I was originally just going to link to a Colugo, which I think are still pretty cool, and probably good evidence of what early stages of vertebrate flight looked like. Functionally they're not doing full flight like a bat, but their flight is still quite a bit better than a flying squirrel, a sugar glider, or one of the assorted other gliding mammals can do. You can see them flapping.
One thing people often miss is that fossils are extraordinarily rare. The general thought is that less than .1% of all species to ever exist have been fossilized. The conditions need to be perfect.
Honestly it's amazing we know as much as we do. It's not easy to preserve something for hundreds of years, let alone millions or billions.
Exactly, sugar gliders and seals mean we don't need transitional fossils between 'land bats' and flying ones, or between 'land dolphins' and aquatic ones: we can already see that evolution can get a similar organism partway there, and if we find some smoking-gun fossils later, so much the better.
I think that we are finding more and more "transitional" fossils.
Fossils are actually incredibly rare, especially at more than a couple of million years old. For every fossil, there were probably a million dead critters that never became fossils (figure pulled right out of my nethers).
Nowadays, it's a given that birds are dinosaurs (theropods, to be precise). There have been enough transitionals, to establish that. I think the latest Jurassic Park finally has a feathered dinosaur in it. When the first movie came out, the look of the "lizards" was pretty much what everyone thought, so a lot has happened, in less than thirty years.
The new Prehistoric Planet[0] series, on AppleTV, takes the “birdlike dinosaur” to extremes.
It looks like they used bird attributes to “fill in the gaps,” everywhere. For example, all the eyes are bird eyes, and the motion capture seems to be from birds.
This argument is even technically named the "God of the Gaps" argument that some of these believers feel that God can only "live" in the gaps of our knowledge, our scientific studies, our available records, so they are always looking for new gaps and always making cases that those gaps "prove" their idea of God.
The fortunate bit for them is that science is a slow, human discovery process and will always have gaps. For a scientist, this is where the wonder of science is: making hypotheses about things we don't know and then going out and finding it with as much rigor as they can think to apply.
The unfortunate bit for these particular sorts of believers that can't imagine their God living in science, that can't imagine their God wanting people to know as much about the world around them as possible, is that while there are always gaps, they are always shrinking or getting "solved" with new theories or new records/discoveries. At some point the only way to "protect the gaps" and thus protect their idea of God, their God of the Gaps, is to lean hard into ignorance and distrust of science. (Sometimes I almost feel sorry for them and that lack of imagination and/or trust that their God cannot exist in science/beyond just hiding in gaps like a creature of darkness.)
As another example of a "closed gap", in addition to some of the other good ones in sibling comments here, that I appreciate because it is very much an ur-example in that a symbol for atheism in counter to that gap has long been the "evolve fish" with legs, which also long seemed like a gap in the fossil record, especially to the "God of the Gaps" crowd.
Since those days we've closed that gap and found fossils of the Tiktaalik and done all sorts of science around the first land fishes, our lobe-finned ancestors that made the first "steps" onto land, the real life "evolve fish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiktaalik
In this case, it is not that we don't know what was going on, or just couldn't find the cats. Cat-like animals were actually gone from in North America in that period.
If they died from a virus, why wouldn't they have fossilized like the earlier or later perished cats? It is then more likely that they haven't died there (e.g., migrated away) or died under circumstances that they died under conditions that they couldn't have fossilized (e.g., volcanic eruption).
Just as a point of order, volcanic eruptions are responsible for a great deal of the fossils we actually have.
Pompeii is too new for actual fossilization to have occurred, naturally, but it clearly shows why eruption is so good for the fossil record: that, flash floods, and tar pits, are the three best ways to envelop a corpse before it's devoured.
I like to think that the cats went off-world when the cat oracles foresaw that the age of man was coming.