The first Devon Rex was appropriately named Kirlee! Kirlee was born in 1960, ten years after the first Cornish Rex had been born in Cornwall, England. A Miss Beryl Cox spotted a curly coated tom cat living in an abandoned tin mine in Devon, England; she had also happened to take in a pregnant stray who had given birth to a litter containing a curly coated male - who was of course Kirlee. Beryl Cox had seen pictures of the Cornish Rex and had assumed that Kirlee was related to that breed. She contacted one of the Cornish Rex breeders, a Mr Stirling-Webb, and allowed him to use Kirlee in a breeding program with Cornish queens. When Kirlee's kittens were born straight haired, they realized that he was NOT a Cornish - a new Rex had been discovered! They decided to discontinue tests amongst the Cornish and the newly found Devon Rex. Instead, tests began with Kirlee and British Shorthairs, which resulted in straight haired kittens ~ but when Kirlee was put with his straight haired daughters, curly coated kittens resulted! On closer inspection, the differences between Kirlee and the first Cornish Rex, Kallibunker, were apparent. Kirlee had a definite "pixie" look to him, as his face was shorter then Kalli's with rounder cheeks. Although they both had "bat-wing" ears, Kirlee's were lower set and had tufts of hair on the back, which Kalli did not have. There was also a difference in their noses - Kalli had a straight, Roman nose, while Kirlee's was slightly less straight and had a stop in it. Both Kirlee and Kallibunker were born as spontaneous mutations of domestic cats, although their mutations were slightly different, thus the different breeds of Rex. The foundation of the Devon Rex breed is based upon the Mendelian theory that a recessive gene is produced in a 1:1 ratio in a back-cross to the original recessive genotype. Thus every Devon today is a descendant of Kirlee.
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