Every cat is one of a kind. Some are more one of a kind than others.
These are six real cats who made scientists, vets and record keepers stop and look twice: for a face, a gene, an age, or simply for where they were found. Most of them started life as ordinary strays.
The six
| The Shillourokambos cat | Buried with a person in Cyprus, about 9,500 years ago. |
|---|---|
| Frank and Louie | Two faces, one cat. Lived 15 years. |
| Venus | A face split cleanly down the middle. |
| Lil BUB | A gene change seen in one mouse and fifteen people. |
| Creme Puff | The oldest cat on record: 38 years and 3 days. |
| A Springfield kitten | A male calico, about 1 in 3,000. |
The cat of Shillourokambos, Cyprus
In 2004, French archaeologists digging at Shillourokambos, a Stone Age village near Parekklisia in the Limassol district, found a grave about 9,500 years old. In it lay a person, and next to them, a cat about eight months old.
There are no wild cats native to Cyprus. Someone brought cats over the sea on purpose, and then chose to bury one beside a person. The find, published in Science, is the oldest known sign of cats living closely with people, thousands of years older than the cats of ancient Egypt.
Its coat is long gone. But no cat has a longer story, and it’s a big part of why Cyprus can call itself an island of cats. There’s more in Cyprus, the first island of cats.
Frank and Louie, the cat with two faces
Frank and Louie was born in 1999 in Massachusetts with one brain and two faces: two mouths, two noses and three blue eyes. The condition is called diprosopus, or a Janus cat, after the two-faced Roman god.
Janus kittens rarely live more than a few days. Frank and Louie lived for 15 years, only one of his mouths ever worked, and in 2012 Guinness World Records named him the oldest living Janus cat. He was a single cat, in case you were wondering. The two names were for the two faces.
Venus, the cat with a split face
Venus was a stray adopted in North Carolina, and her face is split straight down the middle: black with a green eye on one side, ginger tabby with a blue eye on the other.
She’s often called a chimera, two embryos fused into one cat, but nobody has proven it. The cat geneticist Leslie Lyons called her “extremely, extremely rare”, and said only a DNA test from each side of her body could settle it. There’s more on how split faces happen in the rarest cat coats.
Lil BUB, the one-of-a-kind stray
Lil BUB was the runt of a litter born to a feral mother in Indiana in 2011. She had extra toes, a tiny jaw, a tongue that never stayed in, and a rare bone disease, and she struggled to find a home until Mike Bridavsky, a friend of friends, took her in.
Her fans paid to have her DNA read. The scientists found the change behind her bone disease in a gene that had only ever been seen changed like that in one mouse and fifteen people. She was, as far as anyone knows, the only cat with it. She became one of the most famous cats online and raised money for animals with special needs until she died in 2019.
Creme Puff, the oldest cat on record
Creme Puff was a mixed tabby from Austin, Texas, born in August 1967. She died in August 2005, aged 38 years and 3 days, and Guinness World Records still lists her as the oldest cat ever recorded. Most cats live to their mid-teens.
Her owner gave some of the credit to an odd diet that included bacon, coffee and a little red wine. Please don’t copy it: coffee and alcohol are poisonous to cats. There’s a list in what’s poisonous to cats.
A male calico in Springfield
In May 2026, a feral kitten hit by a car was brought to Watching Over Whiskers, a cat rescue in Springfield, Missouri. He was a calico, and he was a boy: the first male calico the rescue had seen in its 12 years.
Calico colours need two X chromosomes, which almost always means a female. Only about one calico in 3,000 is male, usually because he carries an extra X. Every year a few turn up in shelters somewhere, and every time it makes the news. More on how it happens in male calico cats.
The next one could be on your street
Look at where these cats came from: a stray in North Carolina, the runt of a feral litter, a kitten found by a road, a village in Cyprus. Rare cats don’t only come from breeders. They turn up wherever people pay attention.
Snap the cats on your street. One of them might be the next story.
