People and cats have shared their lives for at least 9,500 years, and cats have kept their air of mystery the whole time. Meet breeds whose names point to the wrong place, cats who sailed with navigators and flew into space, wild cats staging comebacks from Spain to India, and scientists working out how cats purr, drink and land on their feet. Along the way you will meet a Siamese who lived in the White House and a record-setting mouser whose total was an estimate.
Every tile in a Cats game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Breeds
nine stories
1The hairless cat that began in Toronto
On the tile: Sphynx1966
The Sphynx looks as if it stepped out of an Egyptian tomb, but its story begins in Toronto in 1966, when a black and white house cat named Elizabeth gave birth to a hairless male called Prune. His bare skin came from a natural recessive gene, but his line is thought to have ended in the early 1970s. Today's Sphynx trace back to three hairless kittens born in Toronto from 1978 and to two found on a Minnesota farm in the mid-1970s, whimsically named Epidermis and Dermis. The Cat Fanciers' Association accepted the breed for registration in 1998.
The Maine Coon's bushy, ringed tail inspired a popular theory that the breed came from house cats mating with raccoons, which supposedly explains the 'Coon' in its name. That is genetically impossible. The breed's real claim to fame came in 1895 at Madison Square Garden in New York, when a brown tabby Maine cat named Cosey won best in show at the first major American cat show. Cosey's silver collar and medal are displayed at the Feline Historical Museum in Alliance, Ohio, and in 1985 Maine made the breed its state cat.
The story goes that the Manx cat was so late boarding Noah's Ark that the closing door cut off its tail. The real explanation is genetics. Taillessness most likely began as a natural mutation among the native cats of the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, and a dominant gene spread it through the island's cats. A tailless Manx carries one copy of that gene, because kittens that inherit two copies do not survive. Manx cats appeared at the first British cat shows and are among the oldest breeds of show cat.
In 1961 William Ross spotted a cat named Susie on a farm in the Tayside region of Scotland. Her ears folded forward, and the Scottish Fold breed traces back to her. The fold comes from a dominant gene. The catch is that the same mutation changes how cartilage forms throughout the body, causing a painful bone and joint disease called osteochondrodysplasia. For that reason, Britain's Governing Council of the Cat Fancy does not recognize Scottish Folds for pedigree registration, and the charity Cats Protection campaigns for a breeding ban.
Why are a Siamese cat's face, ears, paws and tail darker than the rest of it? Two scientists at the Moscow Zoo's laboratory of experimental biology, N. A. and V. N. Iljin, tested the role of temperature and published their results in 1930. Siamese cats kept in cold rooms grew darker coats, and where a patch was shaved and kept warm under a bandage, the fur grew back lighter. The modern explanation is a mutation in tyrosinase, an enzyme that helps make the pigment melanin. The Siamese version works best below body temperature, so the coolest parts turn darkest.
The Burmese breed began with Wong Mau, a small brown cat who came to San Francisco psychiatrist Joseph Thompson in 1930. Fanciers took her for a dark Siamese, but Thompson ran breeding tests. Mated to a Siamese, she had Siamese kittens and brown kittens like herself, and mated to her son, she produced an even darker kitten. Wong Mau proved to be a hybrid of Siamese and Burmese coloring, what breeders now call a Tonkinese. Later breeders kept crossing Burmese with Siamese, producing so many hybrids that the Cat Fanciers' Association suspended Burmese registration from 1947 until late 1957.
Egyptian papyri and frescoes from as far back as 1550 BC show spotted cats that resemble today's Egyptian Mau. The modern breed owes its start to Nathalie Troubetskoy, a Russian princess living in Rome. When one of these cats, long kept as pets by Egypt's nobility and diplomats, came into her hands, she was so captivated that she sought out others and began breeding them. In 1956 she emigrated to the United States, and three Maus traveled with her. The Cat Fanciers' Association calls the Mau the only natural domesticated breed of spotted cat.
The Abyssinian is named for Abyssinia, the old name for Ethiopia, because one of the first known examples, a cat named Zula, was said to have been brought to England from there at the end of a British war. Zula was shown at England's Crystal Palace in 1871. Genetic studies point somewhere else, most probably the coast of the Indian Ocean and parts of Southeast Asia. A clue waits in the Netherlands: a ruddy ticked cat in the Leiden zoological museum, bought in the mid-1830s, is labeled as a domestic cat from India.
The Korat's earliest known record is a Thai poem. The Cat-Book Poems are manuscripts believed to date back to the Ayutthaya kingdom, which ruled from 1351 to 1767, though the copies that survive were made later, mostly in the 1800s. Most versions illustrate 17 good-luck cats of Thailand, and the Korat, a silver-tipped blue cat from Korat province, is among them. In Thailand, Korats were traditionally given as gifts to brides and were seen as bringers of luck and happiness. The first two Korats reached the United States in 1959, imported by Jean Johnson.
Around the 9th century, an Irish monk working at or near Reichenau Abbey, in what is now southern Germany, wrote a poem about his white cat. The cat's name, Pangur Bán, means White Pangur. In the poem the monk compares Pangur's happy hunting of mice with his own scholarly work, each of them contentedly absorbed in his craft. The anonymous poem survives in a single manuscript, kept today at the monastery of St. Paul in Carinthia, Austria, and it has become one of the most familiar poems in Old Irish.
The story goes that Isaac Newton cut a hole in his door at Trinity College, Cambridge, for his cat, and a smaller one for her kitten. The tale traces to an 1827 memoir by a Cambridge man who reported two plugged holes in the old door, while admitting he could not vouch for the story. No evidence shows that Newton kept a cat, and cat holes were far older. In Chaucer's Miller's Tale, from the late 1300s, a servant peeks into a room through the hole where the cat used to creep in.
Samuel Johnson, the great English writer and dictionary maker, doted on a cat named Hodge. His biographer James Boswell recalled that Johnson went out himself to buy oysters for Hodge, so that the servants would not come to dislike the cat for the trouble. Once, when Boswell praised Hodge, Johnson replied that he had owned better cats, then seemed to notice Hodge looking put out and added that he was a very fine cat indeed. Since 1997 a bronze Hodge, beside empty oyster shells, has sat outside Johnson's London house in Gough Square.
Trim was born at sea in 1799 aboard HMS Reliance and became the constant companion of navigator Matthew Flinders. He once fell overboard and climbed a rope back to safety. Trim sailed with Flinders on HMS Investigator's voyage around the Australian continent and survived the wreck of HMS Porpoise. When Flinders was detained on Mauritius while Britain and France were at war, Trim disappeared in 1804, and Flinders never learned what became of him. Flinders promised him a monument but never built one. A bronze Trim was finally unveiled in Sydney in 1996.
In 1745 Empress Elizabeth of Russia decreed that the finest cats of Kazan, the biggest and best suited to catching mice, be found and sent to her court in St. Petersburg. Cats still stand guard there. Dozens live in the sprawling cellars of the State Hermitage Museum, protecting its treasures from rodents, and the museum celebrates them with an annual day in their honor. The city's cats vanished during the hunger of the World War II siege of Leningrad, and afterward new cats arrived by train from across Russia.
6America's first known Siamese lived in the White House
On the tile: Siam1878
In 1878 David Sickels, the American consul in Bangkok, sent a cat to First Lady Lucy Hayes. Named Siam, she is believed to have been the first Siamese cat in the United States, and she became the pet of the president's daughter, Fanny. Siam fell ill about nine months after she arrived and died at the White House despite medical care. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent her remains to the Department of Agriculture to be preserved, but the body was misplaced, and no record explains what became of it.
In ancient Egypt, mummified cats were offered to the lioness goddess Pakhet at her temple near Beni Hasan, then buried. In 1888 an Egyptian farmer digging near the village of Istabl Antar uncovered a vast deposit of them. An estimated 180,000 mummified cats, weighing about 19.5 tons, ended up at an auction in Liverpool, England, on February 10, 1890, where they were sold as fertilizer. A few were spared and donated to the city's museum, and National Museums Liverpool still holds examples today.
Simon was the ship's cat aboard the Royal Navy's HMS Amethyst when it was shelled on China's Yangtze River in 1949. The attack left him with shrapnel wounds to his legs and burns to his back and face, but during the ship's 101-day ordeal Simon kept hunting the rats that threatened the crew's food, and the sailors promoted him to Able Seaman. He was awarded the Dickin Medal, an honor for animals' gallantry, but died in November 1949 before it could be presented. He remains the only cat ever to have earned it.
The story goes that a black-and-white cat survived the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck in May 1941 and was pulled from floating wreckage by the British destroyer HMS Cossack. When Cossack was torpedoed that October, the cat was rescued again and joined the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, torpedoed in November. By then he was called Unsinkable Sam, and he is said to have died in a seamen's home in Belfast in 1955. Royal Museums Greenwich holds a pastel portrait of him, but notes that no Bismarck survivor's account mentions the cat.
On June 20, 2012, an 11-year-old cheetah named Sarah lined up on a certified track at the Cincinnati Zoo. National Geographic photographers recorded her as she chased a fluffy toy dog pulled along on a high-speed cord. Sarah covered 100 meters in 5.95 seconds, beating her own 2009 record of 6.13 seconds, and was radar-timed at up to 61 miles an hour. For comparison, Usain Bolt's best time for the same distance is 9.58 seconds. National Geographic photo editor Kim Hubbard said, 'She looked like a polka-dotted missile.'
A blazing orange tiger seems like poor camouflage in a green forest. The trick lies in the eyes of its prey. Deer have dichromatic color vision and cannot tell orange from green, so to them a tiger's coat looks green, as University of Bristol researchers pointed out in a 2019 study of camouflage and animal vision. The black stripes do the rest, breaking up the tiger's outline among trees and tall grass. The stripes are not only in the fur: a tiger's skin carries the same striped pattern.
Snow leopards live in the high mountains of Asia, including the Himalayas, and unlike most other big cats, they cannot roar. The build of their throat will not allow it. Instead they purr, mew, hiss, growl, moan and yowl, and make a friendly, non-aggressive puffing sound called a chuff. A long tail helps them balance and can wrap around the body for warmth, and wide, furry paws work as natural snowshoes. According to the Snow Leopard Trust, there has never been a verified snow leopard attack on a human being.
Jaguars once roamed the American Southwest, with historical reports from the Grand Canyon's South Rim to Southern California and as far east as Louisiana. They disappeared from the United States, and the last known female was shot in Arizona in 1963. Then, for about three years, trail cameras photographed a male jaguar more than 100 times in the Santa Rita Mountains near Tucson. In 2015 students at a Tucson middle school named him El Jefe, the boss. He vanished late that year, but camera photos taken in November 2021 showed him alive in Sonora, Mexico, about 120 miles south.
The fishing cat of South and Southeast Asia lives up to its name. It makes its home in wetlands such as marshes, swamps and mangrove forests, and it catches fish by scooping them out of the water with its paws or by diving in after them. Its claws stick out slightly even when retracted, which helps it catch prey underwater. Its feet are often described as webbed, but the IUCN Cat Specialist Group notes that the webbing is not much more developed than a bobcat's. The IUCN lists the species as Vulnerable.
Africa's smallest cat, the black-footed cat, weighs only about 2 to 5 pounds and lives in southern Africa, mainly in South Africa and Namibia. Its size is deceiving. Black-footed cats catch prey in about 60 percent of their hunting attempts, while lions succeed only 20 to 25 percent of the time. One cat kills an average of 10 to 14 rodents or small birds a night, more prey in a single night than a leopard catches in six months.
In 2001 only 62 mature Iberian lynx were counted in the wild. Conservationists in Spain and Portugal worked to restore its main prey, the European rabbit, protect its habitat, reduce deaths caused by people and reintroduce lynx to new areas, releasing more than 400 since 2010. By 2022 there were 648 mature adults, and by 2024 the total counting young was estimated at more than 2,000. In June 2024 the IUCN moved the species from Endangered to Vulnerable, and one project leader called it the greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation.
The Pallas's cat, also called the manul, lives in the cold, rocky hills of Central Asia, where temperatures can drop below minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit. It is about the size of a house cat, and according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo, it has the densest fur of any cat in the world. The fur on its underside is darker and longer than the fur above. Its small, rounded ears sit low on the sides of its head, and its pupils shrink to small circles instead of the usual vertical slits.
In February 2012 a wildlife camera in Los Angeles's Griffith Park photographed a mountain lion nobody expected there. Tagged P-22, he had been born in the Santa Monica Mountains and had likely crossed two of the busiest freeways in the country, the 405 and the 101, to reach the park. He lived there until his death in December 2022, in a home range of about 9 square miles, the smallest ever recorded for an adult male mountain lion. His story helped inspire a huge wildlife crossing over the 101 Freeway.
Ancient Egyptians were long thought to have been the first to domesticate cats, around 4,000 years ago. Then, at the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos on Cyprus, archaeologists found a person buried about 9,500 years ago with offerings such as polished stones and seashells, and a cat skeleton just 40 centimeters away. The cat, about eight months old, had been deliberately buried. Cats are not native to Cyprus, so people must have brought them from the mainland. The find, published in 2004, pushed the bond between people and cats back thousands of years.
A 2017 study of ancient cat DNA traced how pet cats spread. An early wave moved from southwest Asia into Europe as early as 4400 BC, and a later wave of cats from Egypt spread across the Mediterranean and much of the Old World. Domestication changed cats surprisingly little, and one of the few traits that tells a pet from a wildcat is the blotched tabby coat. In the study's samples, that marking first turned up in the Middle Ages, in the Ottoman Empire of southwest Asia, and it became common only in the 1700s.
Cats purr at 20 to 30 cycles a second, far below the lowest human bass voice. For about 50 years the leading explanation was rhythmic contraction and relaxation of the muscles in the vocal folds. In 2023 a team led by voice scientist Christian Herbst of the University of Vienna showed that a cat's larynx can produce purring frequencies with no rhythmic nerve signals or repeated muscle contractions. The key appears to be pads of tissue in the vocal folds, in a mechanism strikingly similar to the human creaky voice, or vocal fry.
Most orange cats are male, and calico and tortoiseshell cats are usually female, because the orange trait is carried on the X chromosome. Yet the gene itself stumped scientists for decades. In May 2025 two teams, one at Stanford University and one at Japan's Kyushu University, published the answer together in the journal Current Biology: a small missing stretch of DNA in the region of a gene called ARHGAP36. The Kyushu team was led by geneticist Hiroyuki Sasaki, a self-proclaimed cat lover, and its research was backed by a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Cats show little interest in sweets, and in 2005 researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia found out why. The mammal sweet taste receptor is built from two parts, and in cats the gene for one of them, Tas1r2, is broken by a deletion of 247 base pairs. The gene no longer makes a working protein, so a cat cannot assemble a receptor for sweetness. The team found the same defect in a tiger and a cheetah, suggesting it is common throughout the cat family.
A drinking cat seems to dip its tongue like a spoon, but high-speed video showed MIT engineers something subtler in 2010. The cat curls the tip of its tongue backward, so only the top surface barely touches the liquid. As the tongue pulls up, it draws a column of liquid into the air, and the cat closes its mouth to pinch off the top, keeping its chin dry. The motion balances gravity against inertia. House cats lap about four times a second, while big cats such as tigers lap more slowly.
Georgia Tech researcher Alexis Noel got curious when her cat Murphy's tongue got stuck in a fuzzy blanket. Scientists had assumed a cat's tongue was studded with tiny cone-shaped bumps. Noel's team found that the spines, called papillae, are claw-shaped hooks with scoops built into their tips. A house cat has nearly 300 of them. They wick up saliva and carry it deep into the fur, which cleans the cat and cools it as the saliva evaporates. The team studied tongues from house cats to tigers and designed a 3D-printed, tongue-inspired brush.
How does a dropped cat land on its feet? Some scientists thought it pushed off against the hand that let it go, using it as a lever. In 1894 the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey photographed a falling cat at 12 frames per second. His pictures showed the cat had no spin at all when it was released, yet it still turned over in midair. The result puzzled physicists, and many kept believing in the push-off theory. The puzzle was not fully explained until a paper by Kane and Scher in 1969.
Cats have a reputation for not coming when called, but a 2019 study in Japan showed they do recognize their names. Researchers led by Atsuko Saito played recordings of four words that sounded like a cat's name until the cat lost interest, and then played its real name. The cats typically responded more strongly, moving their ears or heads. Cats living in homes told their own names apart from the names of cats they lived with better than cats in a cat cafe did, perhaps because owners use names more specifically.