Extant felids are hyper-carnivorous predators that originated in Asia c. 11 Mya and diversified in 8 distinct lineages, with 41 species surviving to the Recent. These species occupy almost every terrestrial habitat available in the four continental land masses they occupy and exhibit morphological and behavioral specializations to various locomotor styles and hunting modes. Today, distinct felid ensembles inhabit each continent and major biogeographic region. How the differential structuring of these ensembles was generated, and which evolutionary processes shaped these differences across ensembles, are key emerging questions. Using multivariate statistics, we analyzed a large dataset of 31 cranial and 92 postcranial linear variables describing shape and functional proxies of the entire skeleton of extant felids. We statistically demonstrate the existence of nine felid morphotypes at the global scale, whose occurrence is characteristic of different continental or biogeographic ensembles. Phylogenetically explicit analyses show that morphotypes from different felid lineages converged in different continents, but still ensembles remain distinct due to the fact that various morphotypes are missing in several of those ensembles. However, fossil evidence suggests that most of these missing morphotypes were represented by species from those territories that went extinct during the Quaternary. Furthermore, reconstructing the hypothetical felid ensembles before Pleistocene extinctions rendered the continental felid faunas remarkably more similar to each other than they presently are, leaving their remaining, relatively minor differences to outstanding geographic singularities of each continental land mass.

现存的猫科动物是起源于亚洲的肉食性食肉动物。11种Mya并在8个不同的谱系中多样化，其中41种尚存到近代。这些物种几乎占据了它们所占据的四个大陆陆地上所有可用的陆地生境，并表现出针对各种运动方式和狩猎方式的形态和行为专长。如今，每个大陆和主要生物地理区域都栖息着独特的猫科动物群。这些合奏的差异结构是如何产生的，以及哪些演化过程形成了这些合奏之间的差异，这是新出现的关键问题。使用多元统计数据，我们分析了31个颅骨和92个颅后线性变量的大型数据集，这些数据描述了现存猫科动物的整个骨骼的形状和功能代理。我们统计地证明了在全球范围内存在9种猫科动物形态型，它们的出现是不同大陆或生物地理集合体的特征。系统发生显性分析表明，来自不同猫科动物的形态型在不同的大陆上会聚，但是由于其中一些集合体缺少各种形态型这一事实，仍然使集合体保持独特。但是，化石证据表明，大多数这些缺失的形态型都是由第四纪灭绝的那些地区的物种代表的。此外，在更新世灭绝之前重建假想的猫科动物群使大陆猫科动物群彼此之间比现在更加相似，剩下了其余的，