Have you ever wondered whether house cats are descended from big cats? How bobcats and lynxes are related? If cheetahs and mountain lions are big cats? What are all these little cats running around in the wild?Experts are still studying family Felidae and trying to work out how cats evolved. Unfortunately, there isn't much evidence to work with. The boffins have been able to model the cat family's history with fossils and molecular DNA markers. But, as of this writing, there is still no consensus on the details of cat evolution or how each species got to where it is found today.Computer modeling also can't explain why some lineages, like the bay cat's, stayed in one place (Asia, for the bay cat) while other lineages -- those we will meet in this book -- wandered far and wide.But what's a lineage, anyway? It's basically a way to herd cats, to organize what we know about these mysterious and complex creatures so we can better understand them.Think of the cat family as a tree with eight branches. Call each branch a lineage.Each branch, or lineage, has several different cat species sitting on it -- these all belong to the same lineage. This book is about the four lineages that spread across several continents -- big cats, the puma lineage, lynxes, and wildcats (okay, technically this one is only part of the Felis/domestic cat lineage).To answer the questions up above: -- Fluffy and the big cats sit on completely different branches. -- Bobcats and lynxes sit have their own branch. -- Mountain lions and cheetahs are on their own branch, and it's not the one owned by big cats. -- There are a LOT of little cats out there, but only the wildcats and the house cat have a transcontinental range.In this volume, you're going to get an easy-to-under overview of 17 different cats, including house cats. That's almost half of the cat family!There also are plenty of images, thanks to many skilled photographers around the world who have shared their work online through Creative Commons -- I tried to include as many different sources as possible.This book also contains URLs to interesting videos and conservation sites (the Cat Specialist Group and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature -- IUCN - the red-list agency). It's written in simple English, without jargon, but at the end there is an in-depth reference section so you can fact-check the text and also get a start your own investigations into these fascinating felines.Buy this book today and find answers to questions about family Felidae that you never even knew you had!