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In a discovery that pushes back the timeline of domestic cats in North America, archaeologists have uncovered the earliest known feline remains in the modern-day United States.The find comes from the Emanuel Point II shipwreck, one of the vessels in the doomed 1559 expedition led by Spanish conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano. Published in American Antiquity on April 14, the study sheds light not only on the fate of these cats but also on their role in early colonial ventures...In September 1559, a powerful hurricane devastated the Spanish fleet anchored off the nascent settlement of Santa María de Ochuse.Several...

A New International Project Studying The Origin And History Of Cats Is Investigating Evidence Of An Ancient Feline Migration Into Europe.Previous research had recovered DNA from the Near Eastern wildcat, the ancestor of modern domestic cats, from ancient sites in Central Europe dated to 3000 BC. Such finds preceded the establishment of domestic cats in the region by millennia, which is believed to happened during the Roman period...As such, Dr Danijela and a team of researchers began a new research project combining palaeogenetics, zooarchaeology and radiocarbon dating to study the origins and history of the cat in Central Europe. Their...

A cat sitting in a regular square (l) and the Kanizsa square illusion (r). (Smith et al., Applied Animal Behaviour Science 2021) Our feline friends certainly wow us with their cleverness - they can fetch things, open doors, navigate seemingly impossible obstacles, and even understand basic instructions (when they feel like it, anyway). At other times, they can be hilariously silly. Any cat lover is familiar with their quirks, such as seemingly endless joy at knocking things off tables, and an innate fondness for sitting in enclosed spaces. The latter can apply even if that space is just a two-dimensional...

There’s nothing scarier than finding out that there’s something in your house trying to kill you. Unless it’s just your pet cat. A Twitter user claimed he was having trouble breathing in his sleep, so he set up a camera to see what was going on at night. What he saw, however, was somehow both adorable and also terrifying (as only cats can pull off). *Twitter skip* Luis Navarro posted on the social media site three pictures taken while he was sleeping. His cat can be seen getting closer to his face until it eventually just sits directly on his...

He’s the purr-fect employee: Company in Bucharest hires a CAT as communications director…. And it earns more than a typical Romanian Bossy beat off the competition of 700 other applicants for the top job The fluffy feline was appointed after the company said it was impressed by his attitude Bossy will reportedly receive a salary equivalent to £110 a month plus bonuses By TOM WYKE FOR MAILONLINE PUBLISHED: 12:22 EST, 9 June 2015 | UPDATED: 06:45 EST, 10 June 2015 With the competition for jobs fiercer than ever, the director of communications position at a new start up was always...

Consumer doggie DNA testing is old hat at this point, having been around since 2007. But cat-lovers who wish to decipher their pet's breed are out of luck -- no such tests exist for felines. That fact reflects the state of the underlying science. Since the first full dog genome was sequenced ten years ago, geneticists have identified hundreds of genes behind canine diseases and physical traits. By comparison, just a handful of such genes have been identified in cats. But a group of geneticists is working to close this gap by sequencing 99 domestic cats. This week the researchers...