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Literature: The Voyage Of The Space Beagle

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is a Science Fiction novel by A. E. van Vogt. To be more precise, it is actually the compilation of several short stories that van Vogt had written for a magazine years before. All the stories had in common the involvement of the Space Beagle, an Earth starship sent to explore new areas of space, encountering ever more fantastic -and dangerous- alien lifeforms along the way.

Although obscure today, the stories were enormously influential; to the point that some of the creatures Vogt invented have been openly imitated, most notably the telepathic, cat-like Coeurl (which became a recurring monster in the Final Fantasy series) and even the xenomorphs from Alien might have been based on Voght's work (he certainly believed so.)

A recurrent theme of the stories was that the ship's science officer gave a warning of danger, but was ignored and always ended up having to save the crew by himself.

Tropes in the stories:

Cat Folk: The Coeurl.
First Contact Team: The crew of the Beagle.
Ignored Expert: The lone nexialist (a scientist whose specialty is nonspecialization) in the crew.
Intelligent Gerbil: The Coeurl
Meaningful Name: The title is an obvious reference to the S.S. Beagle, the ship whose voyage of exploration included Charles Darwin (and the story has a similar discovery-of-new-species theme.)
Patchwork Story
Villain Protagonist: The encounter with Coeurl is told from its POV.