🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Beyond tigers, Southeast Asia's oil palm expansion affects a guild of smaller cats, including leopard cat, clouded leopard, marbled cat, and flat-headed cat, with widely varying tolerance of plantatio…

Across their range, leopard cats living in farmland and forest-edge mosaics suffer heavy road mortality, a leading documented cause of death in well-studied populations such as Taiwan. This overview s…

The Tsushima cat, restricted to Tsushima Island between Japan and Korea, is a critically endangered population of the leopard cat. This overview examines its taxonomic status, established by molecular…

Molecular phylogenetics partitions all living cats into eight monophyletic lineages, a framework that now organizes felid taxonomy. This overview names and characterizes them: the Panthera lineage (bi…

Modern cats are divided into eight monophyletic lineages: the Panthera lineage (lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, snow leopards, clouded leopards), the bay cat lineage, the caracal lineage, the ocelot…

The genus Prionailurus includes not only leopard cats but also the fishing cat and flat-headed cat, specialized wetland felids. This overview examines their placement within the leopard cat lineage an…

The leopard cat is the most widespread small cat in Asia, occupying habitats from Siberian forests to tropical islands, and its broad range produces extensive geographic variation. This overview surve…

The leopard cat lineage of Asia includes the widespread leopard cat, the fishing cat, the flat-headed cat, and the rusty-spotted cat, along with the related Pallas's cat. This overview surveys the gen…

The rusty-spotted cat, one of the smallest of all cats, is found in India and Sri Lanka and belongs to the leopard cat lineage. This overview reviews its placement within the genus Prionailurus, where…

The Iriomote cat is a celebrated example of taxonomic demotion in cats. This overview traces how a felid first hailed as a unique living fossil in its own genus was, through molecular evidence, shown…

Genetic research has divided the leopard cat into two species, the mainland leopard cat and the Sunda leopard cat of the islands of Southeast Asia, and this overview reviews the evidence and its conse…

Molecular phylogeography revealed that leopard cats on the Sunda islands of Southeast Asia diverge deeply from mainland leopard cats, leading to recognition of a separate species, the Sunda leopard ca…

Small wild cats, servals, ocelots, fishing cats, sand cats, margays and others, are widely held yet receive less welfare research attention than big cats. This overview surveys their husbandry needs:…

Because leopard cats depend on farmland outside reserves, conservation increasingly relies on incentivising landholders to farm in ways compatible with the species. This overview synthesises evaluatio…

This synthesis reviews the conservation standing of the leopard cat, broadly secure across its vast range thanks to adaptability and tolerance of human-modified habitats, while noting important except…

This influential study reconstructed the molecular phylogeny of all living cat species and dated their diversification, establishing the framework of eight major felid lineages used ever since. Using…

Johnson WE, Eizirik E, Pecon-Slattery J, et al. · Science · 2006