Huge variety of eye colors in today ’s cats may trace back to distant ancestor’s unusual peepers

If you get lost in the luminous orange peepers of housecats or the baby blues of white tigers, thank the granddaddy of all felines—an ocelotlike creature that lived more than 30 million years ago. A new study finds that this distant ancestor of lions, tigers, and housecats sported brown and gray eyes, the latter of which allowed its descendants to evolve a veritable rainbow of iris colors. “I love this paper,” says Juan Negro, an evolutionary biologist at the Doñana Biological Station who has spent decades studying animal coloration. “Eye coloration in cats is something that, surprisingly, hasn’t been approached by scientists before,” he says, perhaps because it’s so challenging to study in such elusive animals. “I really want to thank these guys for daring to deal with these things.” The work began as a class project for Harvard University graduate student and evolutionary biologist Julius Tabin. He initially thought to look at patterns in eye color in people, but turned to wild animals when he noticed the topic was so understudied. With the help of Katherine Chiasson, his romantic partner who at the time was a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Tabin collected images of cats from iNaturalist, a nature-focused social network and crowdsourced species identification system, and Google Images. After filtering for various quality aspects, such as a clear, unshaded view of at least one of the animal’s eyes, the duo narrowed down t...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news