Research overview: incomplete lineage sorting in the felid radiation

Because modern cats radiated rapidly, different genes often disagree about the branching order of species, a phenomenon known as incomplete lineage sorting that arises when ancestral polymorphisms persist through successive speciation events. This overview surveys how felids became a textbook example of this problem, why concatenated gene trees can be misleading, and how coalescent species-tree and genome-wide methods disentangle the true species history from gene-tree noise. It discusses the interplay between incomplete lineage sorting and introgression, both of which produce gene-tree discordance, and how distinguishing them has been central to resolving the felid and especially the Panthera phylogeny.