🧬 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

This study measured or estimated bite forces across many carnivoran species and related them to body size, skull shape, and feeding ecology, building predictive relationships between morphology and pe…

Christiansen, P.; Wroe, S. · Ecology · 2007

Allonursing, the nursing of non-offspring, is best documented in lions but reported in other group-living or colonial felid contexts, including domestic cat colonies. This overview surveys research on…

Even as predators, cats must avoid being killed, and anti-predator behaviour shapes their activity and space use. This overview surveys research on vigilance, refuge use, and avoidance in domestic and…

Felids kill primarily with their canine teeth, and this overview reviews how canine form and the killing bite are matched to prey. Many cats deliver a precise nape or throat bite, the slender, sharp c…

Beyond the mechanics of the flehmen response, felids use vomeronasal sampling to extract social information from scent marks. This overview surveys research on how cats assess reproductive status, ind…

The degree of curvature in a claw correlates with how an animal uses it, and this overview reviews that relationship in cats. Strongly recurved claws favour gripping bark and branches and hooking into…

Cooperation is rare among felids, concentrated in the social lion and in cheetah and feral-cat male coalitions, making the family a useful contrast for theories of cooperation. This overview surveys r…

Cats walk on their toes, a digitigrade posture that lengthens the effective limb and changes the geometry of force transmission. This overview reviews how toe-walking affects stride length, speed pote…

Captive big cats have become subjects of cognitive testing that reveals their learning abilities and informs enrichment. This overview surveys research using touchscreen and apparatus-based discrimina…

Recent research suggests some mammals, possibly including cats, transmit ultraviolet light to the retina, and this overview reviews the evidence and its uncertainty for felids. Studies of ocular media…

The feline commitment to meat is an evolutionary story, and this overview reviews how hypercarnivory and its metabolic specialisations arose in the cat lineage. As cats specialised on vertebrate prey,…

Cats move through a sequence of gaits as speed rises, from a walk to a trot, then to bounding and galloping forms. This overview describes the footfall patterns, duty factors, and energetic and stabil…

Sabertoothed cats needed extraordinary jaw gapes to bring their long canines to bear, and this overview reviews how their jaw mechanics achieved this. Estimates place maximum gape far beyond that of a…

Small cats seem to out-jump big cats relative to their size, and this overview reviews how jumping ability scales across the felid family. Physical principles predict that absolute jump height does no…

Felids span from sub-kilogram wildcats to lions and tigers of well over a hundred kilograms, and body size profoundly shapes how they move. This overview reviews how speed, acceleration, jumping abili…

Felids scratch trees and other surfaces and create ground scrapes that combine visual marks with scent from glands in the paws. This overview surveys research on the marking function of scratching acr…

Infanticide by males is documented or inferred across many felid species, from lions to tigers, leopards, pumas, and others, wherever killing dependent young can hasten a female's next conception. Thi…

Cat skulls vary in robustness and proportion, and this overview surveys how that variation tracks the size of prey a species typically takes. Cats that tackle relatively large prey tend to have more r…

Cats sometimes kill more prey than they consume, a phenomenon called surplus killing that appears when vulnerable prey is abundant and the killing response is repeatedly triggered. This overview surve…

In endangered cats, individual temperament can determine reproductive success and welfare in managed-care programs. This overview surveys research extending the cheetah findings to other species, exam…

Sabertoothed cats are thought to have killed very differently from living felids, and this overview reviews the leading canine-shear hypothesis in that comparative light. Where modern big cats use a p…

Roughly two-thirds of domestic cats display a stereotyped response to catnip, sniffing, licking, rolling, and rubbing, triggered by the compound nepetalactone acting through the olfactory and vomerona…

Play is energetically costly and potentially risky, yet pervasive in young cats, prompting debate over its functions. This overview surveys the major hypotheses, including play as practice for predati…

True tool use is essentially absent in cats, but felids display tool-adjacent behaviours that involve manipulating objects and environments to achieve goals. This overview surveys examples such as usi…

A predator teeth are subjected to repeated high loads, and this overview surveys patterns of tooth fracture and wear in wild felids and what they reveal. Broken canines and worn carnassials accumulate…