Feline humor, news and stories about the ongoing adventures of Buddy the Cat.
If Paleontologists Of The Far Future Tried To Reconstruct Cats
We’ve made enormous mistakes in our reconstructions of prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and mammals. Would paleontologists of the future misinterpret the clues our civilization leaves behind?
Imagine if, far in the future, humanity has spread across a healthy swath of space, colonizing worlds across dozens of light years.
Academics at a prominent science institute, looking to learn more about the humble beginnings of our species, fund a scientific expedition to Old Earth, where radiation and toxicity have finally declined to a point which allows teams to poke through the ruins of our civilization.
As they piece together clues from the rubble, they find references to companion animals who have been domesticated while their wild counterparts continued on.
What does a cat look like? they wonder. Then they find the bones, beginning with a handful of incomplete skeletons…
Critics have long argued that our depictions of dinosaurs are like skeletons wrapped in flesh, with modern representations doing a poor job of representing complete animals. What if the paleontologists and historians of the future mistranslate a word like “fur” or don’t realize the skeletons of cats are the same furry creatures that were human companions?A tiger imagined as a semi-aquatic animal with scales instead of fur, and a skull interpreted in much the same way we interpret dinosaur skulls. “Surviving texts make clear the tiger was comfortable in water, and like its distant cousin the crocodile, would remain mostly submerged, looking for opportunities to ambush prey.”No fur, just musculature, as if an anatomy book of animals is one of the few texts to survive in hard copy.A cat with magnificent plumage: “Research shows felines engaged in elaborate mating rituals, using their vivid colors and patterns to demonstrate virility to females in heat.”Finally, a winged cat. Outlandish? Maybe. But what if of the scraps of mythology to survive is a statue of a manticore, or paleontologists discover the bones of a cat species mingled with those of a large bird that died alongside it in a tar pit? In our time we’ve accidentally invented entire species of dinosaurs by mistakenly matching skulls from one species onto the spines of others, or wildly misinterpreting clues in the body plans of new and unfamiliar creatures.
4 thoughts on “If Paleontologists Of The Far Future Tried To Reconstruct Cats”
Fun idea, but I imagine humans will take cats into space with them. Or maybe the humans will be extinct and sentient cats will try to divine what they looked like.
I think so too. In fact I wrote a whole section about that, and referenced Iain Banks’ Culture novels in which an alien race brought their pets with them when they became a starfaring civilization, but ended up cutting it because the post was really long.
It would make sense for cats (and dogs) to evolve alongside humans if we became a starfaring civilization, as they have evolved alongside us here.
If cats could fly, we’d never hear the end of it from those bird people. There might even be murals on city walls about it. (Too bad they never acknowledge that about hawks and owls.)
Pain In The Bud 
Fun idea, but I imagine humans will take cats into space with them. Or maybe the humans will be extinct and sentient cats will try to divine what they looked like.
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I think so too. In fact I wrote a whole section about that, and referenced Iain Banks’ Culture novels in which an alien race brought their pets with them when they became a starfaring civilization, but ended up cutting it because the post was really long.
It would make sense for cats (and dogs) to evolve alongside humans if we became a starfaring civilization, as they have evolved alongside us here.
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If cats could fly, we’d never hear the end of it from those bird people. There might even be murals on city walls about it. (Too bad they never acknowledge that about hawks and owls.)
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OOOOH – I love the last one.
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