🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This study produced an improved domestic cat genome assembly and compared it with wildcats and other mammals to find molecular footprints of domestication. The authors identified selection signals in…

Michael J. Montague, Wesley C. Warren, Stephen J. O'Brien, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2014

The story of how cats joined human society blends zooarchaeology with molecular genetics. This overview surveys evidence from early Neolithic Cyprus, where a cat was buried beside a human roughly nine…

Domestication reshaped cat behavior, reducing fear of humans and increasing tolerance and sociability, and genetics is beginning to reveal the underlying changes. This overview surveys evidence that s…

Despite descending from wildcats only thousands of years ago, domestic cats differ subtly in genetics and behavior, and characterizing this divergence illuminates the domestication process. This overv…

The Chinese mountain cat, a poorly known felid endemic to the Tibetan Plateau region, has been the subject of debate over whether it is a distinct species, a wildcat subspecies, and whether it contrib…

Hybridization between cat species, both in captivity and occasionally in the wild, has played a larger role in felid evolution than once appreciated. This overview surveys the spectrum from ancient in…

The European wildcat faces a genetic threat from interbreeding with free-ranging domestic cats, which can erode the wild population's distinct genome through introgression. This overview surveys genet…

Habitat loss and fragmentation increasingly isolate cat populations into small patches separated by inhospitable terrain, reducing effective population size and gene flow. This overview surveys how co…

The Felis lineage contains the domestic cat and its closest wild relatives, including the European wildcat, the African and Near Eastern wildcat, the sand cat, the jungle cat, the black-footed cat, an…

The Scottish wildcat, the last wild felid native to Britain, is threatened less by direct persecution than by hybridization with domestic and feral cats that has blurred its genetic distinctiveness. T…

Most domestic cats are random-bred, but a few dozen recognized breeds have been developed over the past century, providing a resource for genetic study. This overview surveys research using genome-wid…

This study traced the ancestry of the domestic cat by sampling wildcats across their range and comparing mitochondrial DNA from hundreds of wild and domestic individuals. The authors showed that all d…

Carlos A. Driscoll, Marilyn Menotti-Raymond, Stephen J. O'Brien, et al. · Science · 2007

This study sequenced ancient DNA from cat remains spanning roughly ten thousand years across Europe, the Near East, and Africa to trace how cats spread alongside humans. The authors identified two maj…

Claudio Ottoni, Eva-Maria Geigl, Thierry Grange, et al. · Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2017