🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

A widely repeated idea holds that the low frequencies of cat purring stimulate bone density and tissue repair, sometimes invoked to explain why cats purr when injured or stressed. This overview survey…

The modern cats diversified into roughly forty species within the last eleven million years, a relatively rapid radiation that left a tangled phylogeny marked by short internal branches. This overview…

This overview explains the reasoning the Cat Classification Task Force used to justify a major revision rather than incremental edits. It describes the decision rules adopted: recognize taxa only when…

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…

The puma once carried more than thirty named subspecies across its vast range, but molecular work drastically reduced this count. This overview explains how genetic analysis revealed that North Americ…

The Asiatic cheetah survives only as a tiny relict population in the deserts of Iran, the last of a subspecies that once ranged across southwest Asia and India. This overview synthesizes what is known…

Night vision depends not only on rods but on a dedicated downstream circuit that carries their signals into the rest of the retina. This survey reviews the rod bipolar to AII amacrine cell pathway, a…

Cats are crepuscular hunters whose retinas are heavily biased toward rod photoreceptors, the cells that mediate vision in dim light. Comparative anatomy suggests the feline retina carries roughly twen…

The rusty-spotted cat vies with the black-footed cat for the title of smallest wild cat, and this overview reviews its diminutive size and associated biology. Weighing roughly one to one and a half ki…

The sand cat is the only cat truly living in deserts, and this overview reviews its suite of adaptations as a model of arid-zone survival. Beyond drawing water from prey, the sand cat copes with extre…

Where cameras are placed, on trails, roads, and game paths that funnel animal movement, or at random or systematic points representing the landscape, fundamentally shapes the data and the inferences i…

If cats form attachments, their owners might serve as a secure base that buffers stress in novel or threatening situations. This overview surveys research testing the secure-base effect in cats, inclu…

The idea that cats domesticated themselves holds that wildcats with reduced fear of humans gained access to abundant rodents and food scraps, reproduced more successfully near settlements, and thereby…

Early-life experience profoundly shapes how friendly and confident a cat becomes, and research has identified a sensitive period in kittenhood, roughly between two and seven or eight weeks, when expos…

Kittens have an early sensitive period during which experiences shape their lifelong sociability, and this overview surveys research defining it. It examines classic and later work indicating that rou…

Eyes cannot maximize both light sensitivity and spatial detail at once, and the cat is a textbook example of how a nocturnal predator resolves that conflict. This survey examines the structural choice…

Early kittenhood includes a sensitive socialization period during which sensory and social experiences strongly shape later behavior. This overview surveys the sensory socialization window, a phase in…

The serval, a long-legged African grassland cat, is the third member of the caracal lineage alongside the caracal and African golden cat. This overview reviews its taxonomic placement in the genus Lep…

Foraging studies cast the serval as one of the most specialized rodent hunters among cats, with rodents often making up the large majority of prey by number. This overview synthesizes observations of…

Compared with dogs and bears, cats have notably short, deep snouts, and this overview explains the biomechanical payoff. Shortening the rostrum moves the canine teeth and carnassials closer to the jaw…

The snow leopard belongs to the roaring lineage yet does not roar, and this overview reviews this exception and what it reveals. Although a member of Panthera, the snow leopard lacks the fully develop…

This overview surveys the evolutionary placement of the snow leopard within the big-cat genus Panthera and its relevance to fossil studies. Once isolated in its own genus, the snow leopard is now firm…

Sequencing the snow leopard genome alongside those of the tiger and lion advanced both big cat phylogenetics and the study of high-altitude adaptation. This overview surveys how the snow leopard genom…

In 2017 the snow leopard was reclassified on the IUCN Red List from Endangered to Vulnerable, a decision based on revised population estimates and the difficulty of demonstrating that numbers had fall…

This overview reviews arguments that Homotherium may have been a social, cooperatively hunting cat. Evidence cited includes accumulations of juvenile mammoth remains at sites like Friesenhahn Cave, su…

Cats can modify their purr to make it more compelling, and this overview reviews the solicitation purr. Research found that when seeking food or attention, some cats embed a higher-pitched, infant-cry…

The recognition of the southern tigrina, Leopardus guttulus, as a species distinct from the northern tigrina, Leopardus tigrinus, is a notable recent split among Neotropical cats. This overview review…

This overview examines the deep evolutionary divergence within Felidae between the Felinae, the conical-toothed cats that include all living species, and the Machairodontinae, the extinct sabertooths.…

Genetic and morphological research established that clouded leopards comprise two species, the mainland clouded leopard and the Sunda clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra, separated for over a millio…

One of the clearest recent felid species splits separated the clouded leopard into two species. This overview explains how parallel molecular and morphological studies in 2006 revealed that clouded le…