The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa

This is a popular-science book on cats by Jonathan B. Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Its original English title is The Cat's Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa. The author is both a scientist and a "cat servant" who shares his home with several cats, and in a warm, humorous voice he answers questions that have long puzzled cat owners: Do lions and tigers meow? Why do cats bring dead mice to your feet or even your pillow? Is it a good idea to keep ocelots or leopard cats as pets? When and why did domestic cats leave the African plains and spread across the world? What is the story behind the cats in ancient Egyptian murals and hieroglyphs? Drawing on modern research methods such as GPS tracking, genomics, and forensic archaeology, the book begins with the evolutionary origins of the African wildcat and explores how natural selection and artificial breeding over several millennia shaped cats into numerous breeds that differ greatly in anatomy and behavior. It also points out that the domestic cat, as a predator, still keeps "one paw in the wild," can quickly go feral when colonizing new habitats, and affects local wildlife. The author discusses both how humans have remade cats and how cats in turn have changed the world around them, and closes with a discussion of the future of the human-cat relationship. The book has twenty chapters and includes hand-drawn illustrations of felines, source notes, and a translator's afterword; it belongs to CITIC Press Group's Nautilus popular-science series.