Ancient Cat Paw Prints Found on Roman Roof Tile

It's now a safe bet that people have been swearing at cats for 2,000 years. Officials at the Gloucester City Museum in England have found an ancient roof tile with the telltale paw prints of a feline being somewhere it wasn't supposed to be, reports the Telegraph. They can only surmise that a cat ran across the wet tile while it was drying, sometime around 100 AD. Despite the prints, workers fired the tile, called a tegula, and popped it onto the roof of a building under construction in what is now Gloucester.

The tile had been tucked away in the museum since 1969 before being spotted. “At that time the archaeologists seem to have been more interested in digging things up than looking at what they found,” the museum curator tells Discovery News. The cat may well have belonged to a Roman soldier stationed at the building site, notes the website. "Cats," observes a blogger at Jezebel. "Even the Romans couldn't keep them in line." (But if you've got one, here's the proper way to pet it.)