#miacids

Lazy drawing of a miacid Vulpavus. Miacoids were basal carnivorans, and probably ancestors of all living carnivorans. Which makes this guy a (many, many times) great-grand-uncle of cats and dogs*.

Vulpavus lived during the early to middle Eocene in what today is North America. It was a rather small (weighting between 3.9 and 6.6kg), arboreal predator. It seems that at least some Vulpavus species could hunt prey close to them in size: there’s direct evidence, in the form of tooth-marks left on the skull, that Vulpavus hunted an early primate Notharctus (about 4kg), belonging to the stepsirrhini suborder (which includes extant lemuriforms).

All restorations of this guy I saw showed him with kind of weasel-like, short fur. I wanted to make him more fluffy, so here he is. Fluffy Vulpavus. At first I was wondering whether the amount of fluff made sense, considering the Eocene temperatures, but then I remembered that today, there certainly are surprisingly fluffy creatures, living in surprisingly hot places, so I just rolled with it.

Here’s also an equally lazy gif showing how I got from a skull to the fleshed-out creature: