🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This influential comparative study estimated bite forces across a broad range of living and extinct mammalian carnivores using dry-skull dissection methods and lever modelling, then scaled the results…

Wroe, S.; McHenry, C.; Thomason, J. · Proceedings of the Royal Society B · 2005

Cat coats are often patterned for concealment, and this overview reviews the function and development of spots, stripes, and rosettes. Patterns such as the tiger stripes and leopard rosettes break up…

Body size affects how easily an animal gains or loses heat, and this overview reviews its thermoregulatory consequences for big cats. Because surface area grows more slowly than volume with size, larg…

Although many cats avoid water, some are capable swimmers, and a few hunt in it. This overview surveys aquatic locomotion in felids, focusing on the fishing cat, whose partially webbed paws and water-…

The classic division between cats that roar and cats that purr was long tied to the hyoid apparatus, and this overview reviews this anatomy and the nuance behind it. The roaring big cats of the genus…

A lion roar is astonishingly loud and low, and this overview reviews the vocal-fold anatomy behind it. Studies of big cat larynges found unusually large, robust vocal folds with a thick layer of fat a…

The roaring big cats and the purring small cats appear to form complementary groups, and this overview reviews the basis and limits of this divide. The flexible, incompletely ossified hyoid and specia…