We’ve made enormous mistakes in our reconstructions of prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs and mammals. Would paleontologists of the future misinterpret the clues our civilization leaves behind?
Imagine if, far in the future, humanity has spread across a healthy swath of space, colonizing worlds across dozens of light years.
Academics at a prominent science institute, looking to learn more about the humble beginnings of our species, fund a scientific expedition to Old Earth, where radiation and toxicity have finally declined to a point which allows teams to poke through the ruins of our civilization.
As they piece together clues from the rubble, they find references to companion animals who have been domesticated while their wild counterparts continued on.
What does a cat look like? they wonder. Then they find the bones, beginning with a handful of incomplete skeletons…
Critics have long argued that our depictions of dinosaurs are like skeletons wrapped in flesh, with modern representations doing a poor job of representing complete animals. What if the paleontologists and historians of the future mistranslate a word like “fur” or don’t realize the skeletons of cats are the same furry creatures that were human companions?A tiger imagined as a semi-aquatic animal with scales instead of fur, and a skull interpreted in much the same way we interpret dinosaur skulls. “Surviving texts make clear the tiger was comfortable in water, and like its distant cousin the crocodile, would remain mostly submerged, looking for opportunities to ambush prey.”No fur, just musculature, as if an anatomy book of animals is one of the few texts to survive in hard copy.A cat with magnificent plumage: “Research shows felines engaged in elaborate mating rituals, using their vivid colors and patterns to demonstrate virility to females in heat.”Finally, a winged cat. Outlandish? Maybe. But what if of the scraps of mythology to survive is a statue of a manticore, or paleontologists discover the bones of a cat species mingled with those of a large bird that died alongside it in a tar pit? In our time we’ve accidentally invented entire species of dinosaurs by mistakenly matching skulls from one species onto the spines of others, or wildly misinterpreting clues in the body plans of new and unfamiliar creatures.
“Can’t find your keys, human? That’s terrible. I don’t know where they are, but perhaps I could recall that information if, say, there were treats involved. Take your time, I’m in no rush even if you are.”
A new study shows dogs and human toddlers are eager to help when their adult caregivers are looking for a missing item, but cats don’t seem to care.
The study, which involved running the same experiment for young children, dogs and cats in their own homes, made it clear cats were fully aware of what was happening and understood their humans were looking for the missing object.
They just didn’t care.
There was one notable exception, of course. If the missing items were important to the cat — a favorite toy, for instance, or a bag of treats — the felines were motivated to help search or direct their humans to the missing objects, the research team from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary found.
But at all other times, feline observers were content to hang back and watch, even when they understood their humans were getting frustrated.
By contrast, young children and dogs actively tried to help and signaled to adults when they thought they’d found the object.
“Lookin’ for something? No, I’ll just watch, thank you. Warm, warmer…oh! Cold…colder…that direction doesn’t look promising, human.” Credit: Gord Maclean/Pexels
So does this mean cats are jerks? Probably. Are we surprised by the results? Not at all.
We still love our furry friends, who do have their own unique ways of demonstrating they care about their humans beyond seeing them as providers of food, shelter, and safety, as well as playmates, minions and servants.
Besides, testing whether dogs or cats were helpful or not wasn’t the point. As the authors note, “[t]hese three species provide an important comparison because they share a similar anthropogenic environment but differ in their ecological and evolutionary backgrounds.”
In other words, they’re interested in figuring out how evolution plays a part in how species behave in particular situations. Although it’s yet to be conclusively proven for this behavior, a likely reason is because domestic cats are the descendants of a mostly solitary wildcat species, whereas we humans and our canine friends have long evolutionary histories of living in social groups and cooperating with each other.
The study is included in the March 2026 issue of Animal Behavior.
Using a technology most commonly associated with science fiction, the UK man is banking on a technologically gleaming future where he and his cat can be revived and meet again.
A man in the UK has spent a small fortune on the possibility of reviving his dead cat.
Mark McAuliffe says he was so upset when his 23-year-old cat’s health began to fail that he made arrangements with a Swiss firm to preserve her body when she passed away.
The 38-year-old adopted Bonny, a domestic shorthair, while he was a teenager, and she’s been with him for more than half his life, including his entire adulthood.
Usually when stories like this make the news, they’re about people who preserve their cat or dog’s DNA for cloning.
That’s not what’s happening here.
Bonny has been placed in a cryopreservation unit, which uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her entire body. Freezing a body essentially suspends it in time. Extremely cold temperatures — as close to absolute zero as possible — suspend cellular activity, including decay.
It’s called cryopreservation, and while the concept is most frequently invoked in science fiction, putting a body into cryostasis is real and within the technological capabilities of modern science.
The company McAuliffe paid to preserve his cat is Switzerland-based Tomorrow Bio, which is affiliated with the European Biostasis Foundation. The technology is used for several other purposes in the medical field, the food industry and in certain engineering applications.
McAuliffe is gambling on the future, or a version of it in which people and animals can be revived and repaired, like Lazarus in a lab. But it wouldn’t be much of a future for Bonny if her human wasn’t with her, so McAuliffe has reserved a spot for himself as well, hoping to meet her in better times.
“This cushioned the blow about Bonny’s death,” he said, “because I have got it in the back of my mind that it is not going to be the final goodbye.”
Employees of Tomorrow Bio inspect a liquid nitrogen pod. Credit: Tomorrow Bio
The European Biostasis Foundation runs the cryovaults where clients are kept. The organization told the Daily Mail that it has five “full body patients,” 15 preserved brains, two dogs and eight cats. In addition, more than 700 people have made arrangements to have their own bodies frozen upon death.
There is, of course, a hiccup.
While freezing a body is possible, thawing is not — not without destroying the body.
That’s because ice crystals form and rupture cell walls when the body is brought out of cryopreservation, no matter how slow the process.
The workaround involves using cryoprotectants, essentially a form of anti-freeze that would prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals despite the temperature.
That, however, introduces an entirely new set of problems, including the fact that cryoprotectant is toxic at the levels required for preservation.
Preserving the brain presents an entirely different set of problems, as our neurons and neural pathways begin to decay immediately after death. Our brain topology and neural connections are part of who we are, part of what makes our minds uniquely our own. Neuroscience and cryostasis technology each have a long way to go before scientists can even attempt to thaw a brain.
So by spending almost $22,000 to preserve Bony, and buying a plan to preserve himself (at a cost of $230,000), McAuliffe is banking on major breakthroughs in biology, as well as the ability to precisely control temperatures. To successfully thaw a body without destroying it, the entire body must be warmed at the same time, including all internal organs. That’s a significant technical challenge.
It’s also a gamble on the general shape of the future, placing hope that progress will continue. It assumes we won’t lapse into another dark age, that we won’t lose technology and expertise to devastating wars, plagues or other disasters that could set humanity back decades or centuries.
Finally, there’s a major hurdle that has little to do with science behind cryopreservation. It’s the simple fact that human lives are short, companies that promise centuries of operation can’t guarantee that outcome, and a lot can happen while a person sleeps away those years.
There’s a great short story by the Welsh science fiction novelist Alastair Reynolds about a wealthy man who wakes after centuries of cryosleep to find that the company who managed his crypt went bankrupt. From there it changed hands several times until it ended up in the portfolio of a corporate raider.
So the narrator, expecting to be woken to fanfare, deferential treatment and a bright technological future instead finds himself indebted and facing a reality much different and more depressing than he ever imagined.
I sympathize with McAuliffe, who obviously loves Bonny a great deal, and I see the appeal of becoming a refugee from the past, entering into a cryovault in the hope of emerging into a better future. But man, that’s a huge gamble.
In the meantime, there are plenty of cats who need homes and have a lot of love to give. Every shelter cat is a potential Buddy!
There’s a disconnect between the usually careful language of research studies and the exaggerated claims of news articles.
The headlines over the past few weeks have all been variations on the same riff: cats meow more frequently to male caregivers because we don’t know how to bond with the little stinkers, we disregard their feelings, and we ignore their pleas.
Others are more blunt in their assessment, like a story from YourTango that stated women “bond deeply” with cats, whereas we men are merely “manipulated” by them.
“Other studies have found that women are much better at giving their cats more attention, understanding their cats’ emotions, and are more likely to mimic their cats’ vocalization, too,” the YourTango story claims. “Whereas for men, the same cannot be said. Considering they tend to give affection more sparingly than women, it’s no wonder that the dynamic is different.”
Just picture it: women levitating above the rest of us, sharing their amazing Female Affection with the poor, emotionally starved pet felines who belong to men. If we’re trying to get rid of the “crazy cat lady” stereotype and spread the idea that cats are great companions for every kind of person, this probably isn’t helping.
“I am NOT a loudmeowth!”
So what’s the source of these claims?
Apparently a study out of Turkey that involved just 31 cats and their humans. All of the human participants were Turkish, and just 13 of them were male. All were recruited online. (And for some parts of the study, like the analysis of greetings by owner gender, only 26 participants were included because the other five did not submit complete data, including the ages of their cats.)
It’s important to make a distinction between what the study’s authors claim and what the media reports, because they’re almost always two different things.
“Science” doesn’t “say” anything. Science is a method for investigating things we don’t understand. It’s not an entity, it has no opinions, and the only clear conclusion from such a small study is that we need more data.
Hogwash! Balderdash! Codswallop!
The research team from the University of Ankara counted more meows directed at the 13 male caregivers in their study compared to the 18 female caregivers. In their paper, the team acknowledged their sample size was too small to draw any conclusions, and lacked the demographic diversity to rule out innumerable potential reasons why those 13 cats meowed more frequently than the 18 cats cared for by women.
Even with a more robust sample size including men of different ages, social classes, and nationalities, correlation is not causation, and it may be that the apparent difference in feline vocalizations disappears with a larger study group that more accurately reflects universal demographics.
Indeed, the study’s authors state clearly that feline greeting behavior is “a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that defies straightforward explanation.” (Emphasis ours.)
The conclusion, as always, is that we need more data, which is one reason why studies must be repeatable.
That nuance doesn’t make it into listicles or stories optimized for maximum shareability on Facebook, so instead we get headlines that present studies as the last word instead of the first tentative steps to understanding a phenomenon.
In case it wasn’t obvious, there is no data to support the claim that men “give attention more sparingly” than women, or that women are better at reading feline emotions. We don’t even have baselines or criteria for those claims. How do we objectively measure “better” when it comes to reading cats, especially when every cat and human bonded pair have their own pidgin “language”? What’s the “right” amount of attention?
“Brrrrrrrruuuuppp!”
As the loyal servant of an infamously talkative cat, I’m not sure gender makes any difference. Bud’s vocal tendencies were already present from kittenhood, and I simply nurtured them by engaging in conversations with him, giving him loads of attention and doting on him.
Often our conversations go like this:
Bud: “Mreeeoww! Mow mow! Brrrrrt a bruppph!”
Me: “I know, little dude. You told me, remember?”
Bud: “Brrrrrr! Brrrruppp! Yerp!”
Me: “Yes, but they’ve tried that already. It’s not just about tokamak design, it’s…”
Bud: “Merrrrrp! Mow mow!”
Me: “No, it’s about plasma containment. No containment, no reaction, no energy gain!”
Bud: “Brrrrr! Mrrrowww! Brupbrupbrrrruppp!”
Me: “Yeah, well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
I really do talk about science and science fiction with my cat, since he seems to respond to it. Of course it’s gotta be at least partially due to my tone, but strangely if I talk to him about other abstract things, he acts like I’m bothering him with so much human nonsense.
Regardless, Buddy and I object to the claim that a talkative cat is a disengaged or neglected cat. It’s not that he talks a lot, it’s that he never stops!
Goodall spent the better part of seven decades with the chimpanzees of Tanzania. Her discoveries were so profound, they forced the scientific community to reevaluate what separates humanity from other animals.
As I’m sure most of you have heard, Jane Goodall passed away Wednesday of natural causes. She was 91.
Goodall’s work was revolutionary and her career was extraordinary. It’s difficult to imagine now, but when Goodall first pitched camp in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park in July of 1960, the scientific community knew virtually nothing about great apes.
Goodall wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms. Being female and photogenic were the first two strikes against her in the eyes of the establishment.
She was self-taught, didn’t have a degree (she later earned a doctorate at Cambridge), and perhaps her biggest “sins” involved empathy and an attitude more buttoned-up scientists saw as anthropomorphizing the animals.
Goodall with a Gombe chimpanzee. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Goodall gave the chimps names (a no-no at the time among scientists), carefully observed and recorded their family trees, worked out the obtuse — to human eyes– social hierarchy of primate troops, and witnessed behavior that no one had ever seen before.
She saw friendship, love and loyalty among the chimpanzees, witnessed a bitter war between the Gombe troop and a splinter group, followed families over generations, and saw one chimp die of a broken heart after his mother passed away. (I recommend Goodall’s 1990 book, Through A Window: Thirty Years With The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and the 2002 follow-up, My Life With Chimpanzees, for anyone who wants to read more.)
Her first major contribution, in October of 1960, not only fundamentally challenged our assumptions about animals, it forced us to change the way we regard our own species.
Goodall, observing the chimpanzees from a distance despite the rain that day, watched as a male she named David Graybeard repeatedly dipped blades of grass into the Earth. Curious, Goodall approached the site after Graybeard left, grabbed a few blades of grass and imitated what she’d seen the chimp doing.
She was astonished when she pulled the grass out and the strands were covered in termites. David Graybeard had been eating. He was using a tool to eat!
Goodall at Gombe in the early 1970s. The primatologist secured unprecedented access to the chimpanzees by gaining their trust. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The discovery was huge because scientists believed tool use was, at the time, limited to mankind. We build and use tools, animals don’t, the thinking went.
When Goodall reported her findings to her mentor, anthropologist Louis Leakey, his prompt response indicated the gravity of her discovery: “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”
Goodall never stopped working with the chimpanzees of Gombe, and today her formerly humble camp has become a permanent compound where researchers — all inspired by Goodall’s story — continue to study our genetic relatives.
But in her later years, Goodall became known for her activism just as much as her work as a scientist. She traveled constantly, engaging audiences on the subjects of animal conservation, respect for nature and understanding our place in the natural order. It’s a job that has become more necessary than ever as relentless human expansion, habitat fragmentation and human behavior push thousands of species toward extinction.
Credit: The Jane Goodall Institute
We lost Frans de Waal, the famous primatologist, in 2024. Now we’ve lost Goodall, and Sir David Attenborough is less than six months shy of his 100th birthday. We’re going to need people to pick up where they left off, and the job is much more difficult than it looks, requiring expertise, charisma and the ability to connect with audiences who know little about the subject matter.
But that’s a problem for another time. For now, let’s remember Jane and appreciate all she’s done over the span of an incredible life and career.
Pain In The Bud 