Excerpt:
The serval (Leptailurus serval) is a medium-sized cat that looks somewhat like a cross between a small cheetah and a large house cat. In reality, they belong to the “caracal lineage” of the Felidae family, along with caracals and African golden cats, though their peculiar shapes, spotted colouration and missing ear tufts set them apart from the other two species. Servals have the longest legs in proportion to their bodies of any of the cat species (hence the model comparison) and a tawny-gold coat dotted with a mixture of spots and stripes. Like caracals, their tails are relatively short in comparison to other cat species. There are rare sightings of melanistic servals, particularly in East Africa, and leucistic individuals have been born in captivity.
The lanky limbs of the serval are not only useful in navigating long grass and dense wetland vegetation, but they confer the serval’s most well-known ability – a gravity-defying leap. The extended metatarsal bones and elongated and unusually mobile toes provide the perfect attachment points for a complex arrangement of tendons and muscles that store and release elastic energy. The result is that servals have been recorded leaping close to 3m straight up and 4m forwards, occasionally snatching hapless birds out of the air at the same time.
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by Team Africa Geographic
