It's funny to think that no matter how our technology develops, cats will be right there along for the ride, completely ignorant of it all. It's humorously comforting to think of an interstellar civilization powered by fusion and AGI serving cats just as they're served now. Scratching posts on starships seems to be inevitable.

This is brilliant.

So, if machines will be decent servants to the cats, will humans get x-ed out of the equation?

This is sort of the story of The Time Machine.

Maybe the cats were themselves invented by mice?

Cats are actually very social animals, they just don't firm similar pack structures to dogs

With modem technology it became feasible to observe cats without disruption and it showed communal behaviours, including communal care for offspring and IIRC even bringing food to share.

All along the line of somewhat transitionally joined communities instead of more stable groups

Warning: if you open that link you'll see a woman using her finger pulling apart a hole on a pussy.

Hat tip on both your (new?) domain name and your username.

Thank you for brightening my day with your website. That is one adorable (and adorably annoyed-looking) cat.

Don’t click that link!

Animals could be bred and... slaughtered...

I think the postulation is that the cats would be so abundant, it shouldn't be hard to find their fossils.

That was my first conclusion, too - the absence of something in the fossil record does not mean that it was not there, just that it did not fossilise.

For one, predators in general often have more gracile build, high power to weight ratio - and don’t fossilise well. They’re also much rarer than herbivores, of course. This means the signal in the fossil record is much weaker and any deviation seems much greater, as you have to turn up the gain to get meaningful data.

Perhaps cats during that period were predominantly dry desert hunters - it is a common niche for felidae - and that environment produces checks wristwatch few fossils.

Perhaps there was another critter extant during that period that just found the crunch of cat bones irresistible, and they all got scavenged.

Perhaps they developed culture and cremated their dead.

Dunno. All that said the E-O was a big transition and it likely did result in gigadeaths, and predators would have been harder hit, ultimately and proportionally.

have you tried turning the computer off on on?

The universe was created to incorporate cats.

> The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 million to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America.

25M - 18.5M years ago.