An adorable curly-haired kitten has taken the internet by storm thanks to its unusual locks — and the cat’s fluffy fur apparently runs in the family.
The orange kitten captured the hearts of thousands after the Twitter account Mean Plastic shared posted photos of the pet, tweeting: ‘I’ve never seen a cat with curls until now.’
The kitten is believed to be a Selkirk Rex, a breed of curly-haired cats that descended from one feline rescue, and people couldn’t resist gushing about the pet’s incredible locks or it’s unique origins.
The Selkirk Rex breed originated in Montana in 1987 after a rescue cat delivered a litter that included four kittens with straight hair and another with unusually curly-hair.
The special kitten caught the eye of breeder Jeri Newman who adopted the cat and named her Miss DePesto after the curly-haired character in the 1980s TV series ‘Moonlighting’.
Newman bred the cat with a black Persian male, and Miss DePesto’s litter of six kittens featured three with straight hair and three with curly, which led the breeder to believe the cat’s curls were a dominant genetic trait.
She named the new breed after her stepfather Selkirk, making it the only cat breed to be named after a person.
In 2012 — 25 years after Miss DePesto was born — researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna confirmed that the felines are a genetically distinct breed, making it the fourth type of curly-haired cat.
However, unlike the Cornish and Devon Rex breeds with curly-coat mutations, the Mother Nature Network explains that the Selkirk Rex’s ‘hair is of normal length and isn’t prone to balding, adding that it ‘differs from the LaPerm breed because its coat is thicker’.
