Why do cats always land on their feet? Scientists found a reasoned answer

The history of studying the "falling cat problem" dates back to the 19th century. Physicists of that time were perplexed by the law of conservation of angular momentum, which states that no object can begin to rotate in space without an external impulse. From a scientific point of view, a falling cat should not be able to change its orientation, as it has nothing to push off from. Nevertheless, practice showed the opposite: cats turned over in the air with incredible ease, always landing on all fours.

Over decades, many theories emerged — from using the tail as a propeller to complex body bending models, but only modern technologies, as Daily Mail writes, have allowed this debate to be settled.

A team of researchers from Yamaguchi University in Japan approached the question from an anatomical point of view. After studying the structure of animal spines, scientists discovered a unique feature: a cat's thoracic spine is almost three times more flexible than its lumbar spine.

It is this feature that allows the upper body to rotate quickly in the air. As the authors of the study note, movement in the thoracic region initiates the rotation of the lumbar region, allowing the cat to quickly orient its body and land on its feet.

To understand how this happens dynamically, scientists analyzed video recordings of two cats during a fall. Slow-motion analysis revealed an interesting detail: in both cases, the animals completed the rotation of the front part of the body fractions of a millisecond earlier than the rear part.

This observation, along with anatomical data, led researchers to conclude that the most probable explanation for feline acrobatics is the so-called "tuck and rotate" model.

According to this model, during a fall, a cat changes the distribution of inertia in different parts of its body and, thanks to this, can rotate in the air.

Despite the laws of physics stating that a rigid body cannot begin to rotate without an external impulse, cats bypass this by rotating their upper and lower body parts in opposite directions.

By tucking their front paws, like a figure skater during a spin, cats reduce their inertia and quickly rotate their upper body. At the same time, they extend their hind paws, creating greater inertia and ensuring the relative immobility of the lower body.

Once their head is facing the ground, cats simply repeat the process in reverse order — tucking in their hind paws, extending their front paws, and rotating the lower part of their body.

Because their upper and lower body parts always twist in opposite directions, the total angular momentum never changes. This allows them to "trick" the laws of physics to always land on their feet.

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