For someone who doesn’t know much about this but has been watching a tonne of Youtube this doesn’t make a lot of sense and I could use some help.
Like, we’ve found mammals halfway between leggy land-bois and frickin’ whales but this thing that’s largely just a lion cub with mods is somehow special and different? I was expecting some absolutely wild and got a cat.
I tried reading through some stuff but I don’t have the skill to read through the source efficiently.
Not a scientist, but I think the BFD is that it's 30k years old from a completely extinct branch of animals (unlike mammoths which are closely related to modern elephants) and the thing they found was a frozen tundra mummy not a fossil so it has soft tissue and stuff unlike other extinct animals we typically observe via fossils like dinosaurs
I think this image on the Felidae wiki sums it up pretty well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae#Phylogeny
Note that everything in this graph is extinct, except the 2 circled subfamilies at the bottom.
EDIT: I basically know nothing about biology and paleontology and am just an amateur wiki-binger, but it seems that the half-whale was further away philogenetically from any live mammals.
I'm guessing that the fact that this is not just some bones but a very well-preserved mummy is what makes this find special.
Please link the story
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