Pretty interesting piece on The Evolution of House Cats at Scientific American, in which we discover that most of the varieties and breeds of contemporary cat are no more genetically different than, in the example given, French and Italian people; that most of the breeds emerged from the UK during the 19th century, and that the first pedigree cat show took place in 1871, just up the road at the Crystal Palace.

The image is the first result (out of somewhere to the north of 25 million) in a recent Google search for “cat picture”.