Geoffroy's cat – the doubly-deceiving feline bête
noire of British zoologist John Edward Gray; illustration from Alcide
Dessalines d'Orbigny's Voyage
dans l'Amérique Méridionale,
published in 1847 (public domain)
During the course of zoological history, mistakes have sometimes been
made when recording the provenance of an animal specimen, often resulting in
all manner of confusion and controversy. Fortunately, the mistake is generally
nothing more dramatic than a wrongly-noted locality within a given country, or,
more rarely, a wrongly-ascribed country. It is quite exceptional, however, for
a specimen to be assigned to entirely the wrong continent. Nevertheless, this
monumental error happened with both of the short-lived felid species documented
here - and, to make matters even worse, it was the same well-respected
zoologist who was responsible for having done so in each case!
On 11 April 1867, within a Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London paper, eminent British zoologist Dr John Edward Gray formally
described and named several new species of felid, based upon specimens in the
collection of the British Museum. One of these new species was Felis
pardinoides, whose type specimen was the
preserved skin and skull of a juvenile individual that had been received by the
British Museum from the Zoological Society's own museum. According to its provenance
label, it had been obtained in India by a
Captain Innes. A small spotted cat, its head and body length was 19 inches, and
its tail length was 9 inches.
Everything seemed perfectly straightforward and unremarkable concerning
F. pardinoides – until 20 February 1872, that is, when
the following revealing response to Gray's description, penned by fellow
zoologist and cat specialist Daniel G. Elliot, was received by the PZSL and duly published:
In the 'Proceedings' of
this Society for 1867, p. 400, Dr. Gray has described a Cat as Felis pardinoides, giving as its habitat India. The typical [i.e. type] specimen is
evidently not an adult animal; and from its resemblance to F. geoffroyi [Geoffroy's cat, nowadays known
scientifically as Leopardus geoffroyi], I felt certain, while examining it, that its habitat was not
correctly given. During my late visit to Leyden I found another specimen of a Cat,
almost precisely similar to Dr. Gray's type, marked as F. geoffroyi, and stated to have been brought from Patagonia, the native country of that species.
This Leyden specimen (which is also that of a young
animal) by the kindness of Prof. Schlegel I have been enabled to remove to London, and thus to identify with the
so-called F.
pardinoides. The
young F. geoffroyi appears to differ from the adult in the
larger size and somewhat different arrangement of the spots, those upon the
sides, shoulder, and rump being, as Dr. Gray describes them, "varied with
grey hairs in the centre, making them appear somewhat as if they were formed of
a ring of smaller black spots." But the general colours of the animal,
with its lengthened annulated tail, is precisely that of typical F. geoffroyi.
Suddenly, India's F. pardinoides had seemingly metamorphosed into the already-described F. geoffroyi from Patagonia – in South America! Gray, however,
did not agree with Elliot's conclusion; and in a concise response published in
the Annals and Magazine of Natural History for 1874, he sought to distinguish various morphological and cranial
differences between his species and Geoffroy's cat.
Clearly, Elliot's radical re-identification would only be conclusively
accepted if a more mature F. geoffroyi specimen that was visibly conspecific with the lone F. pardinoides example were to
be found and documented accordingly. Shortly after Gray's response was
published, however, this is precisely what happened, and by none other than
Gray himself, as he revealed in a second response published within a later
issue of the very same journal for 1874:
The Bogotá
Cat (Felis pardinoides, Gray).
In the 'Annals' for 1874,
xiii, p. 51, I gave the reasons for differing from Mr. Elliot's opinion that
the cat I named Felis pardinoides in the British Museum, received from the Zoological Society as coming
from India, was the same as Felis Geoffroyi
[sic]. At the same time I observed, "the Indian habitat has not been
confirmed; and the species has a very South-American aspect."
The British Museum has
received, from Mr. Edward Gerrard, a cat from Bogotá that I have no doubt is
the same species as the typical specimen of Felis pardinoides; but it differs from it in being a nearly adult
specimen, as is proved by the examination of the skull; and it has a more
fulvous tint, and the fur is softer; but this may only depend upon the age and
season in which it was killed.
Thus ended the odd little history of India's
non-existent F. pardinoides. What makes this such an ironic (and embarrassing) episode for Gray,
however, is that he had already made an almost identical error only a short
time earlier with another wrongly-labelled felid specimen, giving rise to the
equally ephemeral species Pardalina
warwickii - Warwick's cat.
Warwick's cat, illustrated by Joseph Wolf in 1867
(public domain)
As already noted, Felis
pardinoides was one of several new cat species
formally described and named by Gray in his PZSL paper of 11 April 1867. Another one
(the very last in it, in fact) was Pardalina
warwickii. In addition to his own short verbal description
of this species' type specimen, Gray included the magnificent colour plate
reproduced here, reconstructing its likely appearance when alive, and painted
by celebrated wildlife artist Joseph Wolf. As for the specimen itself, Gray
preceded his description of it with the following explanatory account of its
mysterious history:
There is in the British
Museum a Cat that was formerly alive in the Surrey Zoological Gardens, and was
there called the Himalayan Cat, and which, in the 'List of Mammalia in the
British Museum,' published in 1842, I called Leopardus himalayanus. This animal is figured, from the
specimen at the Surrey Zoological Gardens, in Jardine's 'Naturalist's Library'
as Felis
himalayanus, Warwick. The figure is by no means a
characteristic one. The Cat has not been brought from Himalaya by any of the numerous sportsmen and
collectors that have searched that country. It is not known to Mr. Blyth
[prominent 19th-Century zoologist Edward Blyth], nor to any other
Indian zoologist to whom I have shown it; indeed Mr. Blyth states that he
believes it to be a South American Cat.
The examination of the
skull shows that it forms a group by itself; and in my paper, read at the last
Meeting but one, I formed for it a genus under the name of Pardalina.
This enigmatic specimen, of supposed Himalayan provenance, had been
obtained by a Mr Warwick, whom Gray duly honoured by naming its new species
after him, but nothing more precise regarding its early history seems to be on
record.
Two typical, golden-furred specimens (top and
bottom left) of the African golden cat plus a specimen of this same species'
grey-furred 'silver cat' morph (bottom right) (public domain)
Conversely, several years before Gray's 1867 PZSL paper had even been published, Warwick's cat had
already begun inciting controversy regarding its taxonomic identity. In a PZSL paper of 1863, English zoologist Edward
Blyth had deemed it possible that this unusual specimen was actually a silver
cat Felis celidogaster – a species that he in turn considered to be conspecific with the
fishing cat Felis viverrina. (In reality, the silver cat was subsequently shown to be nothing more
than a colour morph of the African golden cat Caracal
aurata.)
In stark contrast, Gray strongly disagreed with Blyth's classification of Warwick's cat, noting
in his own PZSL paper of 1867 that its skull was very different from that of the
fishing cat. In particular, he stressed the length of its brain case, the
shortness of its face, and the convexity of its brow. As with F. pardinoides, however, it
was not long after that latter paper had been published before the perplexing Pardalina was put under independent scrutiny,
and Gray's statements were found to be very wanting in both the taxonomic and
the zoogeographical departments.
In 1870, the Zoological Society's secretary, zoologist Philip L. Sclater,
published a paper in its Proceedings that revealed the origin of Warwick's cat to have
been far removed indeed from the Himalayas. In fact, it had been purchased alive from a Captain Hairby in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and had originated either in Paraguay or in Patagonia! Once again, a supposed Asian cat had been shown to be of South
American extraction – but that was not the end of the unfortunate parallels in
erroneous documentation between Warwick's cat and F. pardinoides, because
studies of the former's type specimen exposed it to be none other than another
specimen of Geoffroy's cat!
Once again, therefore, in 1874, and in the very same volume of the very
same journal in which he had recanted his opinion concerning the identity of F. pardinoides, Gray now did
the same regarding Pardalina
warwickii – reprising in his own defence his earlier
statements concerning the absence of reports of such a cat in the Himalayan
region and the craniological reasons why he deemed the specimen distinct enough
to warrant its own genus. He also explained that because it was supposedly a
Himalayan cat, he had never thought to compare it with specimens of Geoffroy's
cat or, indeed, of any other South American felid.
But where did the notion come from that it had originated in the Himalayas anyway? This
was Gray's answer:
When this cat was alive it
was just the time that we began to receive fine skins of animals from the
Himalayas; and there was an inclination of the dealers to give Himalaya as the
habitat of animals of which they did not know whence they came, as animals from
that country were interesting and fetched a good price...it has been suggested
by Mr. Blyth and others that it may be an inhabitant of South America; but I
have not seen any specimens from there.
Poor Dr Gray – whereas some people superstitiously believe it to be
black cats or white cats that bring bad luck, in his case it was most
definitely Geoffroy's cat!
Exquisite painting from 1883, depicting coat
pattern variation in Geoffroy's cat (public domain)
Indeed, it is fortunate that Oscar Wilde's formidable literary
creation, Lady Bracknell, was both fictitious and unassociated with feline
systematics – otherwise, in her usual terrifyingly acerbic manner, she might
well have observed: "To misplace one cat may be regarded as a
misfortunate. To misplace two looks like carelessness."!!
This ShukerNature blog article is excerpted from my
book Cats of Magic, Mythology, and Mystery.
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