The three-year-old tortoiseshell has her own Facebook page and a YouTube video that's been viewed over a million times. One look at this cat and you can understand why: One half is solid black with a green eye—the other half has typical orange tabby stripes and a blue eye.
How does a cat end up looking like that? Leslie
Lyons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies
the genetics of domestic cats said she's never seen a cat exactly like
Venus.
"She is extremely, extremely rare," Lyons said. "But you can explain it and you can understand it."
Many reports about Venus refer to the cat as a "chimera." In mythology, a
chimera is a mishmash monster made up of parts of different animals. A
feline chimera is a cat whose cells contain two types of DNA, caused
when two embryos fuse together.
