Jo Howard- McCombe

Apr 18, 2024 | onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Daniel Lawson |Jo Howard- McCombe |Mark Beaumont |Rzss WildGenes Laboratory

1 INTRODUCTION Hybridization between threatened species and more abundant relatives can lead to species extinction and is exacerbated by human activity, so it is natural to ask if this can be slowed or reversed.

Nov 6, 2023 | theconversation.com | Daniel Lawson |Mark Beaumont |Jo Howard- McCombe

You are unlikely to have seen one, but wildcats are still clinging on by a claw in Scotland. Most of the cats living in the wild in Scotland are hybrid cats with a mix of wildcat and domestic cat ancestry or feral domestic cats. But my team’s new study showed they lived alongside domestic cats for almost 2,000 years before interbreeding. One of our rarest and most elusive mammal species, European wildcats have been in decline across across Europe and Britain for the past few hundred years.