🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Excavating the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos on Cyprus, Vigne and colleagues uncovered a complete cat skeleton deliberately buried within centimetres of a human grave, the two interred together…

Jean-Denis Vigne, Jean Guilaine, Karyne Debue, Laurent Haye, Patrice Gerard · Science · 2004

Faure and Kitchener synthesized archaeological, iconographic and historical evidence to trace how people and small cats came together across the ancient world. They argued that domestication was a gra…

Eva-Maria Geigl Faure, Andrew C. Kitchener · Anthrozoos · 2009

This study reported the successful cloning of an endangered small felid by somatic cell nuclear transfer using domestic cats as oocyte donors and surrogate mothers. Researchers transferred nuclei from…

Gomez MC, Pope CE, Giraldo A, Lyons LA, Harris RF, King AL, Cole A, Godke RA, Dresser BL · Cloning and Stem Cells · 2004

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

Montague and colleagues produced a high-quality domestic cat reference genome and compared it with wild felids and other mammals to find the genetic footprint of domestication. They detected selection…

Michael J. Montague, Gang Li, Barbara Gandolfi, et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2014

This review synthesized progress in applying in vitro fertilization, embryo culture, embryo transfer, and cryopreservation to nondomestic cats, using the domestic cat as a research model. The author s…

Pope CE · Theriogenology · 2000

This comparative study applied trait ratings to multiple felid species, including domestic cats, African lions, snow leopards, clouded leopards, and Scottish wildcats, to ask whether personality dimen…

Marieke Gartner, David Powell, Alexander Weiss · Journal of Comparative Psychology · 2014

The African or Near Eastern wildcat, Felis silvestris lybica, is the direct ancestor of all domestic cats. This overview surveys its ecology, distribution and behaviour, describing a solitary, territo…

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…

Comparing the domestic cat with its wild ancestor illuminates how domestication has reshaped behaviour. This overview surveys research contrasting African and European wildcats with domestic cats in t…

Modern cat breeds emerged recently from broadly distributed random-bred populations, and this overview surveys research reconstructing their ancestry and relationships. It examines genetic studies tra…

Dogs and cats represent contrasting domestication stories, and comparing them clarifies what domestication means. This overview surveys the differences: dogs descend from wolves through a long, intens…

The domestic cat traces to a desert-adapted wild ancestor, and this overview reviews how that heritage shapes its water physiology today. Descended from the African wildcat of arid regions, domestic c…

Because the domestic cat and its wild relatives remain fully interfertile, hybridization is a persistent conservation concern, especially for the European wildcat, Felis silvestris silvestris, in plac…

Using domestic cats to gestate embryos of related wild species offers a practical surrogate system for conservation reproductive technology. This overview surveys the use of domestic cat recipients to…

The African wildcat, closely related to the domestic cat, has been a key species for demonstrating embryo transfer and related technologies in a wild felid. This overview surveys work in which African…

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…

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…

Transferring embryos of a rare cat into a more common related species as surrogate offers a way to produce offspring without risking the endangered female. This overview surveys interspecies embryo tr…

Although all modern house cats descend from the Near Eastern wildcat, archaeological cats at early Chinese farming villages were later identified as leopard cats, a different genus-level relative. Thi…

Genetic tools illuminate how feral cat populations are connected, structured and sourced, informing management, and this overview surveys that research. It examines studies using molecular markers to…

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…

Animal domestication is often described as following three routes: a commensal pathway, a prey pathway and a directed pathway. This overview focuses on the commensal model as applied to cats, in which…

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…

Adult cats rarely meow at one another but meow frequently at people, leading to the hypothesis that the meow is largely a product of life with humans. This overview surveys evidence that domestic cats…

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…

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