In true feline form, cats took their time deciding whether to jump into humans’ laps. In a new comprehensive study of the spread of domesticated cats, DNA analysis suggests that cats lived for ...

Even during the thousands of years cats have spent in the company of people, we have had little influence on when and with whom they have mated. Physically, domestic cats vary relatively little ...

Dogs. Bedbugs. Corn. They all have this one thing in common. The surprisingly fraught fight for a pet cat in Antarctica The surprisingly fraught fight for a pet cat in Antarctica What is your cat ...

(See National Geographic readers' pictures of cats.) Speaking of wild cats, how similar is our average house cat to its wild ancestors? They’re very, very similar. Domestic cats have only been ...

The results could also provide clues about how domestic cats deal with stress: Previous research in humans has found links between left-handedness and the development of conditions like schizophrenia.

Of the nearly 60 million pet cats in the United States ... who studies the genetics behind domestic dogs at the National Institute of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute, in ...

Cat fanciers have long known that their feline friends have wild origins. Now scientists have identified the house cat's maternal ancestors and traced them back to the Fertile Crescent. The Near ...

The new study takes that a step further by analyzing how cats interact with one another. Their observations of 53 domestic shorthair cats revealed a wide variety of expressions—which combine ...

This story is adapted from commentary written for National Geographic’s daily newsletter ... there are only three confirmed cases of domestic cats (and two confirmed cases of dogs) getting ...

Cats, on the other hand, pretty much domesticated themselves when wildcats followed mice and rats into agricultural settlements. Not only that, but domestic dogs have a 20,000-year headstart over ...