On the island of Madagascar, evolution has worked overtime assembling a menagerie like no other on Earth. That makes any interloper’s history all the more germane.
Take the resident non-native “forest cat,” for example—an animal whose origins have been the subject of much debate. Many scientists have long thought the feline’s ancestors were small wildcats that somehow reached Madagascar from mainland Africa. Others posited that Felis catus, the domestic cat, was also part of the gene pool (though historical and ethnographic data suggest that domestic cats didn’t arrive here until the 1800s—with a U.K. ambassador—after the forest cat was already established on the island nation).
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The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper column-inches than any other cryptozoological subject. There are so many of them now that we feel that they should be archived by us in some way, so we should have a go at publishing a regular round-up of the stories as they come in. Curated by Carl Marshall and Olivia McCarthy
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