The World’s Weirdest Cat Keeps Turning Up Where Nobody Expects

The black serval (Leptailurus serval) is an unusual, melanistic version of the African serval, a medium-sized wild cat that's native to Africa.

Regular servals are stunning; leggy like a supermodel, spotted like a cheetah, with a long neck and oversized ears.

Black servals take this elegance to new heights. They owe their unique colouration to an as-yet-unidentified blip in their genetic code, which affects their pigment-producing cells. Black servals have jet black coats, sometimes with faint ‘ghost’ spots.

They cut a striking silhouette. Servals have the longest legs relative to the body size of any cat. Standing at around half a metre tall (1.6ft), they can run at speeds of 40 miles per hour (64km/h) and leap up to 3m (9.8ft) high.

This comes in handy when chasing down the small mammals, reptiles and amphibians that they eat, and potentially lifesaving when it helps them to evade predators, such as leopards, hyenas and African wild dogs.