Classification
Carnivora → Felidae → Proailurinae → Proailurus. Three species are recognised: P. lemanensis (the type), P. major and P. bourbonnensis.
Plate I · Type Specimen
The First Cat
Proailurus
The earliest animal recognized as a true cat. ~25 million years ago.
Ticker
$PROAILURUS
Solana
Twenty-five million years before anyone thought to put a cat on the internet, there was one cat. Nine kilograms, long-tailed, sharp-clawed, half its life spent in the trees of Oligocene Europe. From its lineage came the cats that followed — sabre-tooths, lions, lynx, and eventually the one asleep on your keyboard.
Contract Address
SPL · Solana
- ~25 Mya
- First appearance
- 9 kg
- Body mass
- 1879
- Year described
- 40
- Wild cats living today
The first cat is documented.
Proailurus — widely regarded as the first true cat.
Plate II
The Specimen
In 1879 the French palaeontologist Henri Filhol gave a name to a small carnivore pulled from the limestone of central France. He called it Proailurus — “before the cat.” In outline it would have looked like a civet: low, long, supple, built to move along a branch. But the teeth were wrong for a civet. The teeth were a cat's.
It is now placed in its own subfamily, Proailurinae, at the base of the family Felidae, and is widely regarded as the first true cat — the animal from which Pseudaelurus, the sabre-tooths, the great cats and the small cats are thought to descend. Everything below is a footnote to this one animal.
Age
Late Oligocene into the Miocene — roughly 25 million years ago, with the genus spanning something like 34 to 20 Mya depending on which material is included.
Mass
P. lemanensis weighed about 9 kg (20 lb) — a shade bigger than a house cat. P. major reached some 23 kg; P. bourbonnensis stayed at 7–10 kg.
Build
A long tail for balance, large forward-set eyes, and sharp, retractile claws — the same mechanism a cat uses today. Compact, low-slung, built like a small cougar.
Habit
At least partly arboreal. A climbing ambush hunter of the warm, closed forests that covered Europe before the grasslands arrived.
Range
Saint-Gérand-le-Puy and Quercy in France; Wiesbaden-Amöneburg and Budenheim in Germany; further material from Spain, Mongolia and China.
Plate III
The Lineage
Sixty-six million years, abridged
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66 Mya
The impact
An asteroid ends the non-avian dinosaurs. The mammals inherit an empty world and begin to fill it.
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42 Mya
Carnivora begins
Small tree-climbing predators called miacids throw off a new branch — the order Carnivora. Everything with a carnassial tooth starts here.
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~25 Mya
Proailurus — the first cat
Nine kilograms of retractile claw and forest patience. Not quite the cat we know, but the first animal palaeontologists are willing to call one.
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~20 Mya
Pseudaelurus and the split
A lynx-sized successor spreads out of Europe and crosses into North America, ending the long “Cat Gap” in that continent's fossil record. Here the family divides: the Machairodontinae — the sabre-tooths — on one side, and, by way of Styriofelis, the Felinae on the other. Every cat alive is on the second branch.
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4.4 Mya
Panthera blytheae
A skull described from Tibet in 2013 pushes the origin of the big cats back past 4.4 million years — and points to Asia, not Africa, as their homeland.
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500,000 yrs
The cave lion
Panthera spelaea parts ways with the modern lion and takes Ice Age Europe, Britain included. Palaeolithic painters put it on cave walls.
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~10,000 yrs
Cats move in
Near Eastern wildcats follow the mice into the grain stores of the Fertile Crescent — and stay. Nobody sets out to domesticate them.
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10,000–8,000 yrs
The sabres fall
After tens of millions of years the machairodonts run out. The branch that kept its ordinary teeth is the branch that survives.
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Today
Forty wild species, and one on the sofa
Forty species of wild cat are recognised. One further species has spread to every continent people live on by being extremely good at being looked after.
Plate IV
The Bestiary
What the first cat gave rise to
Pseudaelurus
The explorer
A forest hunter of small herbivores that walked out of Eurasia and into North America, closing the Cat Gap. From it come both the sabre-tooths and the ancestors of every modern cat.
Smilodon
The sabre-tooth
Stocky, heavily muscled, built to ambush and hold large prey rather than run it down. Hundreds of individuals have been recovered from the La Brea tar pits.
Homotherium
The scimitar-tooth
Found on five continents. Shorter-fanged and longer-limbed than Smilodon, and genomic evidence suggests it may have hunted in groups.
Xenosmilus
The shark-tooth
Its serrated teeth are set in a pattern closer to a shark's than a cat's — consistent with a bite-and-retreat strategy: take a mouthful, wait.
Panthera spelaea
The cave lion
As large as a modern lion and ranging as far as Britain, taking reindeer and bear cubs. We know its posture from the people who painted it.
Felis catus
Still here
No sabres, no bulk, no continent-spanning kill strategy. Just a small ambush predator that worked out humans keep the grain — and therefore the mice — in one place.
Plate V
The Long Domestication
Or: how they got in
Around ten thousand years ago people in the Fertile Crescent started storing grain. Grain draws rodents; rodents draw Near Eastern wildcats, Felis lybica. The cats that could tolerate a village at close quarters ate better than the cats that could not, and that tolerance was passed on. No one was breeding them. There was no project. The animal simply moved in and stayed.
This is why domestic cats are so unlike dogs, cattle or horses: they were not selected for anything. Living alongside us left its mark on their genome all the same — in genes tied to fear response and to learning from food rewards, which is roughly a geneticist's way of saying less skittish, more bribable.
The rest is distribution. Cats travelled on grain barges and trading ships, through Egypt, across the Mediterranean, and eventually everywhere. The body plan barely changed. A house cat is still, structurally, a small ambush predator built on a design that has been working since Proailurus.
Plate VI
The Ledger
Acquisition record & terms
- Price USD
- —
- 24h Volume
- —
- Liquidity
- —
- Market cap
- —
contract not set
last 24 hours
pool
fully diluted
| Total supply | 1,000,000,000 |
|---|---|
| Buy / sell tax | 0% · 0% |
| Liquidity | Burned |
| Mint authority | Revoked |
| Distribution | Fair launch. No presale, no team allocation. |
Contract Address
Verify before you buy
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I
Get a wallet
Install a Solana wallet — Phantom or Solflare — and write the seed phrase down on paper. Never type it into anything that asks for it.
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II
Fund it with SOL
Buy SOL on any exchange and send it to your wallet address. Keep a little spare for network fees.
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III
Swap
Open Jupiter or Raydium, paste the contract address above, check it character for character against this page, and swap.
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IV
Hold
The genus survived the Oligocene, the Miocene and the Cat Gap. Consider matching its time horizon.
Plate VII
Expedition Log
The dig, in four chapters
Chapter I
Excavation
- Fair launch on Solana
- Liquidity burned, mint revoked
- Contract public and verifiable
Chapter II
Preparation
- Live on the usual chart trackers
- The engraving series — plates, memes, stickers
- Word of mouth, one holder at a time
Chapter III
Exhibition
- The Proailurus Gallery — community art
- The palaeontology, told properly and sourced
- Whatever the community builds next
Chapter IV
Preservation
- No roadmap promises we can't keep
- No treasury, no allocations, no unlocks
- Twenty-five million more years
Plate VIII
Bibliography
Everything above is drawn from these
- 1 Evolution of the Cats IUCN SSC Cat Specialist Group The felid family tree from Proailurus through Pseudaelurus and Styriofelis to the forty wild species living today. catsg.org
- 2 The Making of a Cat Nature · PBS From miacids to Panthera blytheae, and the argument that cats domesticated themselves. pbs.org
- 3 The Domesticated Cat Tiny Matters · American Chemical Society The chemistry and genetics of how Felis lybica became the animal in your house. acs.org
- 4 Prehistoric Cats BBC Discover Wildlife Field notes on Smilodon, Homotherium, Xenosmilus and the cave lion. discoverwildlife.com
- 5 Proailurus Wikipedia Filhol 1879, the three species, the fossil localities and the mass estimates quoted on this page. wikipedia.org