What an odd looking cat!

Latin America’s jaguarundi does have an unusually small head, tiny rounded ears, and (though you can’t see it in the above image) a very long tail and body.

You would think them unique, but Borneo bay cats — the world’s least known cat — look a lot like jaguarundis.

This, even though bay cats are only found on the island of Borneo, thousands of miles from the Americas.

I read about the resemblance at the Cat Specialist Group’s page on bay cats and checked it out online.

Here is a bay cat:

These are melanistic jaguarundis in Costa Rica:

There are black Borneo bay cats, too.

More often, the two species — although members of different genetic lineages and separated by our planet’s biggest ocean — come with reddish or gray coat color variations.

I haven’t seen any authoritative comments about this, perhaps because so little information exists for bay cats, but it looks to me like a case of convergent evolution.

Mind. Boggled.

Featured image: Carine06, CC BY-SA 2.0