I have a new paper out in PLoS ONE (coauthored with Marcello Ruta) on the variation and evolution of skull shape in extant and fossil felids. Below, I'll outline a few key points: 1) We analysed the relationships of some extinct sabre-toothed cats, and their interrelationships with modern conical-toothed cats and basal (ancestral) cats using maximum parsimony analyses in PAUP* and TNT. Our results show that all sabre-toothed cats (Machairodontinae, including species with shorter canines, intermediate in form between conical- and sabre-like morphologies) are more closely related to each other than any of them are to modern conical-toothed cats (Felinae). Phylogeny of Felidae (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039752.g001) 2) We quantified skull shape using traditional linear measurements (but adjusted for size, or isometric scaling) from over 300 cat skull specimens and: A) We performed a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to assess the ability of the linea...