Britain’s lost felines

1 WHEN AND WHY DID LYNX DIE OUT HERE?

“Lynxes were definitely in Britain later than the Romans and were still around when the Saxons arrived,” says Ross Barnett in The Missing Lynx. They easily survived the end of the Ice Age, which killed off woolly mammoths and many other megafauna. The final straw, Barnett argues, came some 10,000 years later, with a combination of persecution and deforestation during a period of medieval political turmoil.

Britain’s lynxes died out in the medieval period.

2 DID CAVE LIONS REALLY LIVE IN CAVES?

Not usually. These formidable felines – “lord of the plains and king of the tundra,” according to Barnett – hunted prey such as bison and reindeer in the open. So why the name? Caves just happen to be where their bones are best preserved. The cats vanished from Britain around 40,000 years ago. More recent cave art from France, painted while the species clung on in mainland Europe, provides some fascinating clues – telling us, for example, that cave lions were maneless and hunted in prides.

3 WHICH OTHER CATS ROAMED THESE ISLANDS?

Perhaps the most impressive was a sabretooth cat called Homotherium.

“I like to imagine it as master of the Pleistocene steppe, gracefully wandering, shoulders lolling, as it scans the tundra for its next meal,” Barnett says. Homotherium bones have been found at six sites in the UK. The species didn’t use its serrated teeth to stab or slash prey. It evolved a “hypercontrolled killing bite that probably scythed through blood vessels in the neck, leading to almost instantaneous shock due to loss of blood pressure.” Ben Hoare