Bengal or Occicat Mix?

In December we adopted this cat from a local shelter. She was feral. The initial paperwork from the vet best-guessed her as an occicat, but my wife is convinced that she is an F3 or more dilute bengal. Looking up images and descriptions of the two breeds on the internet has only confused me more, since she seems to be inhabiting a middle ground. What do you think? (Apologies for the blurry pictures--she's still skittish around people and hard to

get a photo of because she's never still for long.)

Difficult to know, esp not being specialist on these breeds.   She may even be a quite "common" spotted tabby.  There are such animals too, you know.  

But whomever she is, she is very sweet.  And seems to adapted nicely to living indoors.

I didn't know tabbies even came in spotted, before you mentioned it! I've always had mackrel tabbies, and then there's our boy (seen creeping into the last picture) who's a classic tabby. Having google'd "spotted tabby", I think you're probably right. She has the tabby M on her face, as well.

I was wondering primarily because she's quite big. It's hard to tell from the photos, but she's about the same size as our sheltie puppy. She's also very active and very noisy. She picks toys up and runs around the house with them in her mouth, yelling at the top of her lungs.

Now, spotted tabbies arent that common.  Which is funny because its a dominant gene. But neither are ticked tabby - and they say ticked tabby is the top of the ladder on the dominant tabby ladder...

She  sounds alike a funny and fun girl!

Bengals are known to be very active, so she may after all have a Bengal Ancestor.

Although, quite a few young cats ARE very active.  My russian blue boys were when young.

There are four types of tabby patterns: 

Blotched (marble), stripes, dotted and agouti. You can often see them mixed up on the same cat's coat.

You can read more on the tabby coat pattern here - 
[article="22334"]Tabby Cats  [/article]
Unless you got her from a breeder (which I see you didn't), she's very likely just a super beautiful gray tabby DSH!   If your vet really thinks she's a purebred cat, you can always run genetic testings for the genetic markers of these breeds. With no papers, there will be no other way to tell without such tests, I'm afraid.

There are actually 13 tabby patterns, though some are breed specific:

- Mackerel

- Broken Mackerel Striped

- Braided

- Classic (Blotched)

- Marbled or Clouded

- Sokoke

- Spotted

- Oceloid

- Rosetted

- Freckled or Speckled

- Ticked

- Pinstriped

- Agouti

The way you can tell the difference between a standard spotted tabby and a hybrid is the alignment of the spots.  Spotted tabbies have vertically aligned spots where wild hybrids will be horizontally aligned.

This cutie looks to be a Spotted tabby from the pictures shown but there's not a great profile picture.

Edit:  It can be hard to tell the difference but here's an example of what I mean:

I don't know very much about tabbies wish I knew more. As for Bengal their fur can be a clue. The fur of a Bengal is generally very soft and if you look very closely in the light you can see little glittering specs. Bengals seem to like heights. They can get bored very easy because they tend go be very clever. A bored Bengal is a trashed home. Try to find toys that challenge it.

This is one of the best sources of information I've found is: http://messybeast.com