milieu

I often see foxes referred to as “catdogs” on Tumblr, but I wonder if folks realise how true that really is.

There’s a phenomenon called convergent evolution that occurs when two taxonomically unrelated species exploit the same ecological niche. The features that are needed to best take advantage of a given niche are pretty much the same everywhere you go; thus, over time, those species will become anatomically and behaviourally similar, even though they’re completely unrelated.

And foxes? Foxes are what you get when an ecosystem has no native small felines, so a canine species evolves to take advantage of the ecological niche that would have been exploited by a small feline, if one existed.

In other words, a fox is literally what you get when a dog tries to cat.