All the Cats, Explained

[00:02] gorgeous poster, [music] you all liked it a lot. But one comment kept coming up over and over and over again. When are we going to make a feline one? Well, your wish is our command because unlike cats, we actually respond to commands.

[00:17] Hi, I'm David and this is feline [music] earth. This is a feline and so is this and so is this and so are all of these kitties. Wild felines come in all shapes and sizes and live all over the world. [music] Plus, there are more than half a

[00:31] I'm going to take you on a tour of the amazing feline family, both wild and made to [music] celebrate them. Okay, let's start off with a few of our favorite extinct kitties. The largest cat to ever exist was likely Smileon

[00:46] weighed roughly half a ton and had [music] canine teeth up to 11 in long. Its massive teeth allowed it to take down big prey, including bison and giant ground sloths, likely with just one bite to the throat. [music] One of my

[00:59] favorite extinct felines is the American cheetah, which used to live all over the arrived. It wasn't closely related to the modern cheetah, and it was a lot fast, which helps explain why its favorite meal, the pong [music] horn, is

[01:13] still the second fastest mammal in the world today. Let's go back a little farther in time, 30 million years ago, to meet Proorus. It looked kind of like a mongoose and likely lived up in the trees hunting birds and rodents across

[01:25] first feline which means that it was the grand caddy of all modern kitties. cats. Let's start with the largest living cats over here on the panther branch. A few lions still live in a small part of India, but most lions roam

[01:39] the savas of Africa. [music] Lions live in social groups known as prides where and fight off rivals while the smaller sleeker females take care of the hunting and the cub care. And as Kate wants me to point out, lions can be even bigger

[01:52] they actually steal more food than they hunt. Tigers, on the other hand, mostly live in the forest of Asia, and they're usually solitary. They tend to be ambush hunters, using their stripey camouflage to blend into the grass before launching

[02:05] [music] And lions and tigers can get together. Since felines tend to be much mammal families, that means that they can make hybrid babies together easier famous example is the liger. [music] the offspring of a male lion and a female

[02:20] tiger, which pretty much only happens in captivity. Ligers are huge, as big as because the genes that limit growth in Tyigons, which are the offspring of a female lion and a male tiger, look

[02:33] they're way smaller. All right, let's build out this panthetherra branch a are confusingly similar. Here's how to tell them apart. Jaguars live in the Americas, while leopards live in Africa

[02:46] patterns known as rosettes that are large and have a central spot, leopard rosettes are smaller and don't have a spot in the middle. Also, while any black coat could be called a black panther, jaguars and leopards are the

[03:00] only species of big cats that regularly produce individuals with extra melanin. actually that closely related to leopards. They're more closely related to tigers. These rare cats do live in the snow though up in the Himalayas

[03:13] full of insulating fat help them survive the cold. Oh wait, there's also the rest of the panther branch a long time either the leopard or the snow leopard. This slightly smaller kitty [music]

[03:27] which also lives in Asia is the best tree climber of all the big cats. Okay, more closely related to modern cats, the Fellini branch. Let's start with the bay the world. This small kitty only lives on the island of Borneo, and so few have

[03:42] been observed in the wild that we're not even sure what they eat. The marbled cat lives in Asia and looks like a mini clouded leopard, except that it has an it climbs through the trees. [music] The serville has the longest legs of any cat

[03:55] them to pounce on mice in the African savannah. [music] The caracall, which lives across Africa and parts of Asia, is easily recognizable thanks to the >> [music] >> The toughs likely act as acoustic

[04:08] small prey like birds nearby. [music] The cod cod is so small it looks like a jaguar kitten. It prowls around the [music] food, a little bird known as the wetwet. The ancilla is another itty

[04:22] [music] its spots as camouflage while it hunts little prey like lizards. About 20% of anillas, though, [music] are totally black. That's likely because on night, so the darker color also works well as camouflage. [music]

[04:35] The Maray is a small cat that lives in Mexico and Central and South America. food, the tiny monkey known as the tamarind, it sometimes mimics the monkeykey's call to draw its prey closer before it pounces. There are a lot of

[04:48] ocelots down in the Amazon, and one of their go-to meals is mice. [music] Ecologists think that their rodent heavy diet actually helps the forest grow, as buried seeds behind that, instead of getting eaten, germinate into new

[05:01] plants. The bobcats of North America are called bobcats because it looks like bobbed, but no one really seems to know why that is. It's possible that there's no real evolutionary reason. Perhaps some mutation caused them to grow a

[05:14] short tail and it didn't help or hurt, so it just sort of stuck around. Lynx are closely related to bobcats and share the same tiny tails. They also have cool mustaches. [music] The larger Eurasian lynxes love to eat row deer. On average,

[05:28] each lynx takes down more than 60 deer every [music] year. Okay, let's take a the feline tree. The cheetah, which can run faster than any other land animal. Because every part of a cheetah

[05:41] have a flexible spine that acts like a coiled spring, a small aerodynamic head, acts like a rudder when they turn at high speed. The puma is another record setter. It can lead distances of almost 40 ft, making it the best jumper in the

[05:56] over the Americas and different people from cougars to mountainlands to catamounts to panthers. [music] jaguarundi of central and south america

[06:08] [music] That's because the jaguari not only looks like an otter, it also tends to live close to rivers and will even jump in and catch fish. Okay, let's the wild cats most closely related to our furry pets. The leopard cat looks

[06:23] And while leopard cats are not the ancestors of modern domestic cats, there's evidence that long ago in China, some of them were kept as pets. This is a palac's cat. Its dense gray fur and low round ears make it look sort of like

[06:36] adapted to the cold [music] plateaus of Mongolia and Tibet where it lives. In it often sits with its paws [music] on its tail to keep its little toies warm. The tiny sand cat has large ears relative to its size, allowing it to

[06:51] African desert from as far as [music] half a kilometer away. Then there are the cats that are just called wild cats. [music] The African and European species of wild cats are slightly larger than most modern domestic cats, but otherwise

[07:04] that's no coincidence since domestic cats are directly descended from wild cats. In fact, wild cats probably started habituating themselves to people around 10,000 years ago, around when humans first invented agriculture. Once

[07:17] [music] we started storing things like grain, rodents moved in, and the wild Over the millennia, domestic cats started to differ from their wild cat ancestors. While wild cats almost exclusively [music] eat meat, domestic

[07:30] matter in order to feed off of our scraps, and they become a little less we fell in love with our new feline companions was ancient Egypt. Egyptians literally worshiped cats, and the modern breed known as the Egyptian Mau is

[07:45] cats. Remember how I mentioned earlier that cat species can make hybrid babies more easily than other animals can? Well, the Bengal cat is a hybrid of a domestic cat, usually an Egyptian mau, and a [music] leopard cat. It's the only

[07:58] pet cat that has rosette markings. And even though most Bengals are now the domestication, they're still illegal to own in some areas. Speaking [music] of hybrids, there's also the Savannah cat, which is part servil and part domestic

[08:10] cat. Okay, let's get into some of the other domestic cat breeds. Ragdoll cats are known for their large size, long hair, blue eyes, and tendency to go limp when they get picked up. Ragdolls are sometimes called puppy cats since they

[08:23] [music] up tricks like retrieving. Main coons are the most popular cat breed and the longest one. The longest domestic cat ever measured was a main named Stewie who stretched out to [music] more than 4 feet from nose to tail. In

[08:37] addition to their size, maincoun also often exhibit polyactylism, that is extra toes, since the gene associated with it is common among their breed. recognizable thanks [music] to the very cute way their ears bend down over their

[08:50] heads. Two of Taylor Swift's cats are Scottish folds. Unfortunately, that fold causes cartilage to grow abnormally. And that means that pretty much all Scottish folds also develop arthritis. The American shortorthair is the descendant

[09:04] of working cats that came over to the US from Europe on ships, including the and were tasked with protecting the cargo from mice and rats. The British shorthair is the most popular cat breed in England. And it's a relatively chunky

[09:16] boy. It's got a thick build and a wide face that makes it look super content. for the cheshure cat in Alice in Wonderland. Siamese cats have a triangular face, long ears, [music] and an elongated slender body. Their

[09:29] fact that all Siamese cats are sort of temperature-cont controlled albinos. The warmer parts of the cat end up as white, while the cooler parts are pigmented. Persian cats are easy to identify due to their long hair, short legs, and

[09:41] extremely flat [music] faces. In the movie Austin Powers, Dr. Evil's cat, Mr. played by a Persian cat. But when Mr. After Bigglesworth comes back from being cryogenically frozen, he's bald. They didn't shave the Persian, though.

[09:54] Instead, they swapped it out for a sphinx cat, which is naturally hairless due to a genetic mutation. Turkish angoras look very similar to Persian nearly as flat. [music] Angoras are more likely than other cats to be

[10:06] heterocchromatic, meaning that they have different colored eyes. The Devon Rex is a small kitty with a short curly coat and wideset ears, which to me makes it fairy tale. It kind of looks like the sort of cat a pixie would have. The long

[10:20] regal with their beautiful coats, but they're known as the jokesters of the cat world due to their playfulness and actual interest in human company. Norwegian forest cats have long fur and dense, water-resistant undercoats that

[10:32] keep them warm as they play in the snow. Despite their bulk, these cats are great [music] climbers. But the vast majority of cats out there aren't purebred. They're the feline equivalent of muts. You might have heard these cats referred

[10:44] to as domestic short hairs or long hairs, unless you're British. If so, you there's no real selection in these cats for specific appearance genes, these patterns. Let's go through a few of them. A tabby is any mixed breed with a

[10:59] Approximately 80% of domestic cats are [music] tabies. It turns out that the stripey jeans cats inherited from their feline ancestors are pretty strong. That patterns, too, including solid colored

[11:12] cats are often associated with bad luck and witchcraft, mostly thanks to Ages that associated them with the devil. All Calico cats are female pattern is linked to the X chromosome. The name comes from the Indian city of

[11:28] Calakut, which is famous for its colorful printed fabrics. [music] again because the genes that control the orange and black pattern are on the X chromosome, but unlike calos, they are way less white and the colors tend to be

[11:41] more blended like those on a tortoise's shell. Byolor cats have just two colors, Occasionally, this pattern forms so that the kitty looks like it's wearing socks or a dress shirt. In [music] fact, the tuxedo version of the bycolor cat is the

[11:55] basis for Mr. Mophles, the magical cat in the musical Cats. The feline family makes for an amazing catalog of cats. We love our cats here at Minute Earth, and we loved making this video. And if this video was the perfect catnip for you or

[12:09] learn that you can buy this awesome poster from our DFTBA shop. It will look And it's also the [music] perfect gift for any cat lover in your life. Just go to dftba.com/mittar right meow. [music] And if you buy both

[12:24] our K9 and feline poster together, you'll get 15% off. Thank you and thanks you'll get 15% off. Thank you and thanks for supporting Minute Earth.