How dogs and cats are evolving to look alike and why it’s humans’ fault

Domestication has made cats and dogs more diverse, but also curiously alike – with serious implications for their health and welfare, new research shows.

At first glance, Persian cats and pugs don’t seem like they’d have much in common. One’s a cat, the other’s a dog, separated by 50 million years of evolution. But when evolutionary biologist Abby Grace Drake and her colleagues scanned 1,810 skulls of cats, dogs and their wild relatives, they found something strange. Despite their distant histories, many breeds of cats and dogs show striking similarity in skull shape.