Big Cats, House Cats, and Wild Dogs

I'm reading the book Do Cats Hear with Their Feet? by Jake Page. He says that there are some 36 species of cats, large and small. Biologists break up the cats into four groups or lineages—the Ocelot lineage, the Domestic Cat lineage, the Pantherine lineage (includes the cougar, cheetah, puma, and serval) and the Panthera lineage (includes lynxes and all other big cats).

Leopard

And "according to British paleontologist Alan Turner, structurally the domestic house cat 'can be seen as simply a scaled-down version of a lion or a leopard, and in evolutionary terms the larger cats may even be considered as scaled-up versions of something much like a domestic cat.' They all have relatively long limbs, a short gut for digesting only meat, feet with claws, scissorlike cheek teeth called carnassials for shearing off pieces of meat, and especially long, sharp canine teeth. They are extremely supple animals, and most of them can climb trees with ease.”

What is amazing to me is that even though they are classified as different species, many can breed with each other. Page writes: “There used to be an almost hard-and-fast, and practical, rule about the idea of species. It was simply that all members of a species can breed with each other but cannot successfully breed with members of another species and produce reproductively viable offspring. But for a long time now the wild dogs have messed this all up. Coyotes, wolves, and domestic dogs were all given their own binomial names, Canis lupus for wolves, Canis latrans for coyotes, and Canis familiaris for the domestic dog. But they can all successfully mate and produce viable offspring. . . .  And it is now the same with cats. Some rather intrusive people have mated lions and tigers and leopards in various combinations, producing ligers, tiglons, and leopons—and some combinations and particularly females have produced sexually viable offspring.”

  

Savannah Cat

Have you heard of the Savannah cat? It's the result of breeding a domestic cat with a serval (wild African cats larger than house cats, with black spots on a tawny coat, long-legged, with large ears). I wonder what other combinations could reproduce—at least theoretically.

Serval