Carnivore
In captivity or domestic settings, obligate carnivores like cats and crocodiles can, in principle, get all their required nutrients from processed food made from plant and synthetic sources.
All wild felids, including feral domestic cats, require a diet of primarily animal flesh and organs.
[9] Characteristics commonly associated with carnivores include strength, speed, and keen senses for hunting, as well as teeth and claws for capturing and tearing prey.
[10] The sudden disappearance of the precambrian Ediacaran biota at the end-Ediacaran extinction, who were mostly bottom-dwelling filter feeders and grazers, has been hypothetized to be partly caused by increased predation by newer animals with hardened skeleton and mouthparts.
After their decline due to the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction event, the niches of large carnivores were taken over by nautiloid cephalopods such as Cameroceras and later eurypterids such as Jaekelopterus during the Ordovician and Silurian periods.
[12] The dominance of temnospondyls around the wetland habitats throughout the Carboniferous forced other amphibians to evolve into amniotes that had adaptations that allowed them to live farther away from water bodies.
[12] After the Carboniferous rainforest collapse, both synapsid and sauropsid amniotes quickly gained dominance as the top terrestrial animals during the subsequent Permian period.
Some scientists assert that sphenacodontoid synapsids such as Dimetrodon "were the first terrestrial vertebrate to develop the curved, serrated teeth that enable a predator to eat prey much larger than itself".
[14][15][16] In the early-to-mid-Cenozoic, the dominant predator forms were mammals: hyaenodonts, oxyaenids, entelodonts, ptolemaiidans, arctocyonids and mesonychians, representing a great diversity of eutherian carnivores in the northern continents and Africa.
Most carnivorous mammals, from dogs to deltatheridiums, share several dental adaptations, such as carnassial teeth, long canines and even similar tooth replacement patterns.
[17] Most aberrant are thylacoleonids, with a diprodontan dentition completely unlike that of any other mammal; and eutriconodonts like gobiconodontids and Jugulator, with a three-cusp anatomy which nevertheless functioned similarly to carnassials.
