Did you know that tigers and your domestic house cat are related? Tigers and domestic house cats share 96% of their genes, or in simple terms their DNA, with each other (Cho et al., 2013). Look at a domestic cat, do you see the similarities between that cat and a tiger? Pay attention to what they eat, how they hunt, their claws, and their coloration.
Some other fun facts about tigers are that tigers and lions have the greatest relative brain size of all the cats (Turner, 1997). Tigers and snow leopards are so closely related they are considered to be ‘sister species’ (Davis, Li, & Murphy, 2010).
Literature Cited
Big Cat Rescue (2014, May 14). Are domestic cats like tigers? [Video]. YouTube.
Cho, Y.S., Hu, L., Hou, H., Lee, H., Xu, J., Kwon, S., Oh, S., Kim, H., Jho, S., Kim, S., Shin, Y.,
Kim, B.C., Kim, H., Kim, C., Luo, S., Johnson, W.E., Koepfli, K., Schmidt-Kuntzel, A., Turner, J.A.,...Bhak, J. (2013, September 17). The tiger genome and comparative analysis with lion and snow leopard genomes. Nature Communications, 4(2433). https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3433
Davis, B.W., Li, G., Murphy, W.J. (2010). Supermatrix and species tree methods resolve
phylogenetic relationships within the big cats, panthera (Carnivora: Felidae). Elsevier: Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2010.01.036
Turner, A. (1997). The big cats and their fossil relatives (1st ed.). New York: Columbia
University Press.
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