Alie Ward

Yeah, we did a laryngology.

And I was like, what the fuck floating bone in our neck is this?

And I was like, news to me.

But so the hyoid bone is what's making the roar?

Okay.

And again, big cats tend to be able to roar.

up to 114 decibels, which is roughly the volume of a chainsaw, audible from up to five miles away.

And that is because they have a more flexible hyoid bone and voice box, except the snow leopard, which is technically, again, a big cat, but has a more ossified hyoid bone, like the puma and the cheetah.

non-big cats, but that hard hyoid bone allows it to vibrate its voice box dozens of times a second, making that purring noise when it's breathing both in and out.

And cats purring, they tend to do this when they're chilling, when they're happy, when they're resting, or sometimes as a stim when they're stressed out.

So with all these overlaps in size and hyoid bones, why aren't all seven cats big cats, or at least in the genus Panthera?

Well, the original ancestor to all these kitties originated in Africa.

And Imogene says that these cat ancestors migrated north out of Africa into what is now Central Asia or parts of what's now Europe.

But some migrated onto land that would become North and South America once Pangea busted up roughly 200 million years ago.

So they diverged there.

Now...

Not big cats are the shorter small cats, and those include lynx, which weigh up to 60 pounds, the up to 30-pound ocelot, and the bobcat, which is between 15 to 40 pounds.

So compare that to the South American jaguar, which can top 200 pounds and eat crocodiles.

Unknown is if a jaguar would eat half the crocodile and leave the rest on your porch as a gift, which would be sick.

But yeah, big cats, they're not inside kitties.