The Scottish wildcat has been wiped out by breeding with domestic cats
After 2000 years of isolation, a few decades of interbreeding have rendered the animal âgenomically extinctâ
Though it lies in ruins on the northeast coast of England, Kilton Castle was once an imposing stone fortress, home to several noble families, andâit appearsâat least eight cats. Archaeological excavations in the 1960s uncovered a well, at the bottom of which lay the bones of several felines dating back to the 14th century. The animals were an odd mix: Some were domestic cats, but other, larger specimens appeared to be European wildcats, a fierce, burly species that has inhabited the continent for hundreds of thousands of years. The two speciesâ closeness in death was deceptive. A study published today in Current Biology finds that even though European wildcats and domestic cats overlapped in Great Britain for more than 2000 yearsâincluding at sites such as Kiltonâthey appear to have almost never interbred. That changed suddenly about 70 years ago, when domestic cats began to mate with wildcats in Scotland. In the span of mere decades, the genome of the Scottish wildcatâthe last remaining wildcat in Great Britainâhas become so corrupted that the animal is now effectively extinct, a second study in the same issue finds. The findings could complicate ongoing efforts to save the most endangered mammalian carnivore in Great Britain...
Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/scottish-wildcat-has-been-wiped-out-breeding-domestic-cats
