Cats' closest relatives—linsangs, hyenas, and genets—share a striking characteristic: dark brown eyes. So why do big cats exhibit a remarkable diversity in eye color, including gray, blue, green, and yellow as well as brown? Harvard Griffin GSAS PhD candidate Julius Tabin and co-author Katherine Chiasson used advanced machine learning techniques to analyze a vast array of public photographs, offering new insights into the evolutionary pathways of ancestral felids in their study published in iScience. Their research, described by Tabin, not only challenges long-held assumptions about eye color variation in wild populations but also underscores the importance of felids as a model for understanding eye color evolution.
