Why Cats All the time Land on Their Ft

Falling cats all the time land on their toes” is up there with evolution by pure choice and legislation of gravity when it comes to ironclad scientific truisms understood by the general public, but it surely wasn’t all the time that approach. The Nineteenth-century French physiologist and early movie pioneer Étienne-Jules Marey was the primary to movie felines dropped the other way up and file how they twisted their our bodies midair to land safely. 

Marey’s brief movie kicked off a scientific debate that’s continued amongst physicists and physiologists for over a century. The query boils right down to this: If cats don’t have anything to push off of, how can they handle to show midair? 

A brand new examine published in The Anatomical Record zeroes in on feline anatomy to offer a solution.

To learn the way cats handle this acrobatic stunt, veterinary physiologists from Yamaguchi University in Japan targeted on their backbones. They carried out a collection of “destructive failure” checks on segments of the spines from 5 donated cat cadavers. (In different phrases, they twisted them till they broke.) They discovered that areas of the cat’s backbone show totally different levels of flexibility—the thoracic backbone within the higher physique was extremely versatile, whereas the decrease lumbar backbone was comparatively inflexible. 

Read extra: “Can a Cat Have an Existential Crisis?”

In the much less macabre portion of the experiment, they took a web page from Marey’s e book (or higher put, filmography) and used high-speed cameras to movie residing cats reorienting themselves as they fell. First, the cats twisted their heads and forelimbs towards the bottom, then their decrease our bodies adopted, permitting all 4 legs to line up and cushion their fall. 

“These results suggest that trunk rotation during air-righting in cats occurs sequentially, with the anterior trunk rotating first, followed by the posterior trunk, and that their flexible thoracic spine and rigid lumbar spine in axial torsion are suited for this behavior,” the examine authors wrote.

Simply put, the stiffer lumbar backbone acts as a stabilizer of kinds, anchoring the extra fluid thoracic backbone and permitting the cat’s higher physique to twist midair. With the entrance half taken care of, the hind portion can comply with swimsuit. 

It’s a satisfying reply to an age-old query, however is it satisfying sufficient to persuade scientists to cease dropping cats? Probably not.

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Lead photograph by Higurashi, Y., et al. The Anatomical Record (2026).