The Cat Family: Domestic and Wildcats

European wildcat

Perhaps surprisingly, there is some confusion and debate as to the correct scientific name for the familiar domestic moggy. There are, in fact, at least three different possibilities, all of which have their supporters among the people who study such things.

Firstly, there's the option that domestication has had such radical effects on the cat that it can be considered a separate species. In this case, its correct name is Felis catus. That name was first awarded to the animal in 1758, in the oldest listing of scientific animal names still considered valid. At the time, Carl Linnaeus, who wrote the list in question, intended it to apply to both wild and domestic forms, although the domestic version was raised to subspecies status by Johann Erxleben 22 years later.

Miocene (Pt 18): Return of the Cats

Barbourofelis

For much of the Miocene, bears were represented in North America by the single genus Ursavus. This was relatively primitive, and small by the standards of modern bears, although still easily identifiable as such. It seems to have left no local descendants, but, around 7 or 8 million years ago, it was joined - and eventually replaced - by new arrivals from Asia.

The best known of these were Indarctos and Agriotherium, bears that were widespread across the Northern Hemisphere of the time, and common enough in both Asia and Europe. Indarctos was the smaller of the two, roughly the size of a black bear, and with what was probably a similarly omnivorous diet. It was likely more closely related to pandas than to other modern bears, and died out as the Miocene ended.

Male Chauvinist Seals

There are four basic mating systems that can be seen in mammals, or, indeed, any other creature that possesses two clearly defined sexes. In monogamous systems, a male and female pair mate with one another and then typically remain together to raise their young. This tends to occur wherever raising young is an energy-intensive task that requires the full-time attention of two adults to work.

In polygynous systems, one male mates with multiple females, to maximise the number of offspring he can sire. In the polyandrous system, it's the other way round, with a single female mating with multiple males (some mole rats do this, but it's rare in mammals). The final option is a promiscuous system, where both sexes have multiple partners.

A History of the Bamboo Rats

In terms of number of species, the mouse-like rodents are the most successful group of mammals alive today. The group is typically considered to consist of six families, with the vast majority of species crammed into just two - the mouse family itself, and the cricetids, which includes the voles and hamsters. These, however, are relatively late arrivals, and there are two families that split from the main line of mouse-like rodents long before the ancestors of the mice and voles diverged from one another.

One of these consists of a grand total of three species (maybe), living in the forests of southern Asia. The other goes by the technical name of the Spalacidae, and it consists of animals that have the rather unusual trait of spending almost their entire lives underground. There are at least 35 species of these animals, found in various places across Europe, Asia, and Africa. This is a fairly wide distribution, which raises the interesting question of how they managed to spread that far when they seem to have fairly narrow habitat preferences. Until recently, the evolutionary history of these oddities has been something of a mystery but now, it seems, we are starting to get enough information to piece together an overview.