London, Jan ary 27: A cat, who has become an instant internet sensation, has mystified animal experts by trekking 200 miles home after disappearing on a family road trip eight weeks earlier.

Exhausted and emaciated, barely able to stand and too weak to meow, Holly the cat appeared from nowhere on New Year's Eve in the back garden of a Florida family home.

For six days, Barb Mazzola and her children put out food and milk for the nervous animal, eventually coaxing her inside their house in West Palm Beach.

They fell in love with the cat, a tortoiseshell with distinctive black, brown and ginger patterning, nut when Mrs Mazzola took it to the vet, she reluctantly asked if the cat had an implanted microchip that would identify its original owners.

It turned out her name was Holly and that her owners Jacob and Bonnie Richter lived just a mile away.

What was truly remarkable was that they had lost Holly two months earlier when she bolted out of their mobile home on a trip to Daytona Beach - 200 miles north along Florida's Atlantic coast.

It has also turned her into an internet sensation among feline aficionados and spawned countless theories about how sights, sounds and smells, an inner compass or some memories of the drive north may have guided her homeward odyssey.

"It is a complete mystery. She may have had some basic sense of direction and then got clues from sights or sounds as she got closer, but the truth is that we have no idea how she got home," the Telegraph quoted Marc Bekoff, a University of Colorado professor who specialises in animal behaviour, as saying.

What seems certain, judging from the state of its paws, is that it walked home by road and pavement, rather than somehow hitching a lift or going cross-country. (ANI)