Research overview: phylogenomic methods applied to the cat family

Reconstructing the felid tree has driven the adoption of increasingly sophisticated analytical methods, from single-gene trees to genome-wide coalescent and network approaches. This overview surveys how phylogenomics handles the cat family's challenges, including incomplete lineage sorting and introgression, through species-tree estimation, tests for gene flow, and phylogenetic networks that depict reticulate evolution. It discusses the shift from viewing the felid phylogeny as a simple bifurcating tree to modeling it as a network with horizontal connections, the computational tools involved, and how methodological advances continue to refine our picture of how cats are related and how their genomes were assembled through both branching and blending.