IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Guggisberg, C.A.W. | |
| Sand-Dune Cat _Felis margarita_ (Loche 1858) | |
| 1975 Book Chapter | |
Characteristics, distribution and habits of the sand-dune cat When the French first explored the Ouargla Oasis of the northern Sahara in 1885 and 1856, Capitaine Victor Loche, attached to the expedition as a naturalist, collected a new species of cat at Ngocuca (or Negoussa), which he later named Felis margarita after Commandant Margueritte, the leader of the party. In time, a few more specimens of what has become known as the sand-dune cat have been obtained, but it still is a rarity in zoological collections. In 1927, S.I. Ognev, the Russian mammalogist, described, under the name Eremaelurus thinobia, a desert cat from Repetek in Turkmenistan which showed such a remarkable similarity to Loche's sand-dune cat that some taxonomists wondered whether the two might belong to the same species. Taking into consideration the enormous distance separating the two populations, however, this seemed most unlikely, and Pocock suggested that Felis margarita and Eremaelurus thinobia could well have originated separately from African and Asiatic wildcats and followed parallel lines of evolution in adapting to almost identical desert conditions. The problem was dramatically solved when Wilfred Thesiger, the British explorer brought back from Ramlat al Ghafa, in the eastern part of the Rub al Khali, the "Empty Quarter," the skin of a cat which closely resembled both the sand-dune cat of the Sahara and Ognev's Repetek cat. The skin unfortunately was not complete, but a few years later, in 1952, a specimen was caught alive on the southern edge of the Rub' al Khali and sent to the London Zoo, where it lived for seven years. It was unmistakably a sand-dune cat and, with an Arabian population linking the cats of Transcaspia and the Sahara, there was no reason not to consider them as conspecific. Ognev's name "thinobia" thus became a synonym for the earlier margarita. The species is regarded as closely related to the wildcat. |
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