American "cheetah" and dire "wolves"

Found on Deviant Art; some images. It's worth pointing out that the American "cheetah". Miracinonyx is not, actually very closely related to the true cheetah, Acinonyx, but is instead most closely related to the mountain lion, Puma concolor. It probably resembled the true cheetah a great deal, at least in terms of morphology, but not necessarily in terms of coloration or soft tissue, which is where many people get it completely wrong when restoring it. This is a nice picture, but still too "cheetah-like" in terms of facial markings and spots. I've seen restorations that are more mountain lion-like in coloration, and I think that's a better interpretation. Not to say that it had the same coat as a mountain lion; after all, tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards are all closely related and don't have the same outer tissue superficial resemblance at all, really, but there's no reason to assume that they looked like cheetahs, especially with the unique spotting that they have compared to other cats, or with the unique "tear tracks" that cheetahs have. 

I do think that it's extremely inconvenient that we don't see these guys anymore. All of our missing megafauna is fascinating to me, and I strongly suspect, as I mentioned yesterday in my Appalachian jaguar post, that the whole narrative of the Quaternary extinction event is largely false, and many, if not most of those megafaunal animals survived into the modern age, and some of them were even seen by the earliest Americans. (Not; Injuns are not Americans, and were very specifically excluded in the Preamble to the Constitution. The Americans were the descendants of European colonists, primarily British.)

The dire "wolf" is also not a wolf, as was previously assumed, so restoring it as wolf-like may not be very correct. It is a member of the Canina tribe, so it's not closely related to the South American weird guys, or to the foxes, but within Canina, it is the most divergent. It is less closely related to wolves than modern jackals are, or African painted dogs or the Indian dhole, etc. It would be more likely to be accurate to restore like like African hunting dogs than like wolves, although I've never seen anyone do that before. But I have seen a start of restoring them as not wolf-like, which is really fascinating to me. I love the idea that they were probably unique with a unique visual cue that you could spot right away if you saw one.

Same artist as above.

In theory, although in practice this doesn't much matter, the Old Night setting has a North American Pleistocene fauna, with anything from the Old World present as needed... but honestly, are they needed?

North America had its own horses. Many Injun tribes claim to have had their horses for many generations longer than Spanish had released them, and say that the narrative that they became expert light cavalry and riders in just a couple of generations by trial and error is, of course, absurd. They were good horsemen because they'd always had horses.

True, Injuns say a lot of things that are historically suspect. But this one I think is likely. Sadly, we'll never really know, because the US cavalry killed most of their horses, and any that they have now are ones that they've acquired more recently. DNA tests will, therefore, give false positives (or at least possible false positives) in favor of the Narrative, not the Injun story.

America also had camels. And long-legged lamas. And, as noted, "cheetahs". The Columbian mammoth is more closely related to the Asian elephant than the African elephant is. If it had survived to be seem by modern eyes, we'd simply call it the American elephant. That same is true for the wooly mammoth further north. We had stag-mooses. Shrub-oxen. More varieties of pronghorns. Sabertooths. Scimitar-tooths. American "lion" (also not a real lion, spoiler alert.) The short-faced bear. And, of course, all of the same animals that we do know because they're still here; the moose, the elk, the grizzly, the mountain lion, the beaver, the antelope, the buffalo, etc. 

Most of those have an old-world analog, so I'm not sure that it makes much sense to split hairs and say, "No, no, it's not a dromedary camel, Camelus dromedarius, it's the Camelops hesternus, the Western camel. What's the difference, you say? Well, not much. We're not sure if the western camel had a hump, it otherwise was about the same as a dromedary."

Well, then why distinguish them at all? That's my dilemma. The North American megafauna is specifically interesting to me, but there's no reason to not just make it be the same as old world.