Cats not the only lounge lizards

Darwin noted that domestic cats have larger guts than their wild cousins, writes Richard Collins

Their ancestors, living in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago, were recruited as mouse and rat catchers by the early farmers.

Did these pioneer house cats already have longer wider intestines or did this trait evolve subsequently among their descendants in captivity? A paper just published in The Science of Nature claims that lizards on Greek islands have adapted their digestive systems to cope with the food shortages common in isolated habitats. Did the ancestors of our cats do something similar under the pressures of domestication?