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Ancestor: West Catlandian Mountain Cat

Size: Smallest Rocat: 70cm (1m including tail), Largest Rocat: 110 cm (150cm including the tail)

Dietary Needs: Predatory carnivores to smaller animals such as rabbit, mouse, sparrow and common lizard descendants. Catches fish by passing or seasonal opportunity. More tolerant of carrion meat than their ancestors but only up to a certain point of decay. Certain environments allow for a slower rate of decay, such as freezing cold or very dry habitats. In these environments corpses remain edible for longer, meaning cats in those areas are more likely to discover carrion while it's still edible.

Life Cycle: Much like their ancestor, males compete over females only for the opportunity to mate. If she isn't in estrus (which means all year except winter, spring also if she didn't get pregnant in winter) they won't be interested and will even treat her threateningly as food competition. 

Kittens are born between spring and summer and spend their first couple of weeks in a  grassy, shrubby patch where they hide from threats whenever their mother goes out to hunt. The litter is between 1 and 3 kittens. They drink their mother's milk and gradually move on to solid meat as they gain their first set of teeth, and are off milk long before the time they develop their adult set of teeth. It takes all year for a kitten to learn from their mother how to survive, and they are usually scattered away from her by late winter or early spring of the year after their birth. They are reproductively ready by their first year, but young females have a low success rate at rearing kittens. 3 kitten litters where all survive to adulthood are usually raised by older females.

Other: Their fur is extremely thick, especially that of the silver rocat. Brown rocats have thinner fur because they don't encounter temperatures as low as the silver rocats, but it is still very thick because they can still experience freezing nights.

Both cats are also incredibly agile and sure-footed, but the silver cat is more so on slopes and even near-vertical surfaces. A flexible body, sensitive and grippy paw-pads, and the power and speed to create high momentum, allows these cats to travel through snowy mountain peaks and cliffs to reach areas inaccessible to other animals, giving prey nowhere to hide as nowhere is out of reach to the silver rocat.

Species:

There are only about 3 species of silver rocat but 10 brown rocat species. Brown rocats can't cross the tallest mountain peaks or highest elevations. This makes them more isolated around the margains of the mountains. Silver rocats move much more freely. What's more they hold bigger territories due to food scarcity. Because of this silver rocat genes tend to spread around freely, limiting speciation. Because of their restricted movement and narrow bands of habitation brown rocats speciate more readily.

Brown and silver rocats look different but are not that much different. This is because brown rocats evolved from silver rocats several times over. Silver rocats were the first rocats, though they were closer to "false green" dark yellow of their mountain cat ancestor. Since their evolution silver rocats have moved between the mountains and settled in the lower valleys or nearby plains and deserts, which nearly always results in the evolution of a brown variety (ranging between brownish grey, reddish brown, gold or golden brown). Thus each population of brown rocat started out more different than they would have if they'd had one single ancestor. What makes things more complicated is that these populations commonly intermingle and hybridize despite not doing so with silver rocats. Trying to trace ancestry of brown rocats illustrates a large complicated web of hybridisation. Thus although brown rocats are polyphyletic, for the purposes of this project I am considering them a sub-genus of rocat.

Coat colour variation is always more distinguished in an isolated population. Long established lineages in the mixed gene pool default to a medium brown, though some individuals are by rare chance born with expressions of the more distinguished ancestral colours. By 2 Myh, most rocats are this default brown and there are very few populations with more distinguished colours.

Brown rocats vary the greatest in size compared to silver rocats. The smallest rocat is a brown one as is the largest. Silver rocats are limited in size by prey availability, but must attain a minimum weight or they will lose body heat too quickly during the hardest times. This puts silver rocats in the middle of the size range.