Serval a short, black-tipped tail. The serval has the longest legs of any cat relative to its body size. Active in the day as well as at night, servals tend to be solitary with minimal social interaction. Both sexes establish highly overlapping home ranges of , and mark them with feces and saliva. Servals are carnivores – they prey on rodents (particularly vlei rats), small birds, frogs, insects, and reptiles. The serval uses its sense of hearing to locate the prey; to kill small prey, it leaps over above the ground to land on the prey on its forefeet, and finally
Serval that no such specimen had been identified by him or his colleagues, and that it differed considerably from the common serval. In 1944, Pocock identified three races of the serval from northern Africa. Three subspecies are recognised as valid since 2017: The phylogenetic relationships of the serval have remained in dispute; in 1997, palaeontologists M. C. McKenna and S. K. Bell classified "Leptailurus" as a subgenus of "Felis", while others like O. R. P. Bininda-Edmonds (of the Technical University of Munich) have grouped it with "Felis", "Lynx" and "Caracal". Studies in the 2000s and the 2010s show that the serval,