One of the only domains I ever bothered purchasing for myself was https://catgap.com
Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.
So, if machines will be decent servants to the cats, will humans get x-ed out of the equation?
Duration is clear, start and end not clear
25M - 18.5M years ago.
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.