60 Fun Facts About Big Cat

What is the highest reliably recorded running speed of a cheetah, the fastest land animal?

The best reliably measured sprint is 104 km/h (65 mph); the often-quoted 114 km/h figure came from a faulty measurement.

What is a group of lions called?

An average one has about 15 members: several related females, their cubs and up to four adult males.

The jaguar is the only living Panthera species native to which part of the world?

Its ancestors probably crossed from Eurasia over the Bering land bridge in the Early Pleistocene.

Which of these cats has stripes rather than spots?

Every tiger's stripe pattern is unique, and the stripes on the limbs and forehead run horizontally rather than vertically.

What is a 'black panther'?

In leopards the black coat comes from a recessive gene; Gabon's coat of arms uses one.

Cougar, puma, mountain lion, catamount and panther all refer to one cat. Which Guinness record does it hold?

Guinness counts more than 40 names in English alone.

Why can the snow leopard not roar, unlike the other four Panthera cats?

Its vocal folds are only 9 mm long and offer too little resistance to the airflow, even though it has the same partly ossified hyoid as its relatives.

The male lion's most recognisable feature is what?

Maneless males have been recorded in Senegal, in Sudan's Dinder National Park and in Tsavo East, Kenya.

What is a liger?

The reverse cross is a tigon; ligers usually grow larger than either parent, tigons do not.

The cougar is the largest member of the cat family able to do what?

It is a member of the Felinae subfamily, so it purrs like a house cat and cannot roar.

Which of these habits is the tiger famous for, unlike most cats?

It will happily cross rivers up to 8 km wide, and Sundarbans tigers swim between mangrove islands.

Outside Africa, wild lions survive in only one country. Which?

The Asiatic lion clings on in and around Gir National Park in Gujarat.

What do the cheetah's black tear streaks connect?

The streaks run from the corners of the eyes down the nose, and the cat also has partly retractile claws without a protective sheath.

Roughly how much of their historic range have tigers lost since the early 20th century?

They are locally extinct in West and Central Asia, most of China, and on Java and Bali.

Where does a leopard sometimes drag its kill after an ambush?

It also climbs down head-first and spends much of the day resting on branches.

How many living species make up the genus Panthera?

Tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard and snow leopard; the cheetah and cougar are 'big' but sit in the other subfamily, Felinae.

Which two Panthera species are each other's closest relatives, according to a 2010 genetic study?

The lion, leopard and jaguar form the other cluster, with lion and leopard splitting only about 2 million years ago.

From how far away can a lion's roar be heard in good conditions?

The lion has the longest larynx of any cat, which gives it the most powerful roar.

For roughly how many hours a day is a lion inactive?

They walk for two hours and eat for about 50 minutes on an average day, with hunting peaking around dawn.

The jaguar has an unusual killing method for mammal prey. What is it?

The same bite force lets it crunch through turtle and tortoise shells.

Where does the jaguar rank among the world's cat species by size?

Males can reach 1.85 m in body length and 158 kg.

A cheetah's most famous adaptation for speed apart from its legs is which body part?

Powerful hindlimb muscles, long limbs and that bendy spine let it overtake a pronghorn with a 137 m head start.

Which predators threaten cheetah cubs and routinely steal adult cheetahs' kills?

It is one reason the cheetah hunts by day, when the bigger night hunters are resting.

An African cheetah subspecies was reintroduced to which country in 2022, decades after going extinct there?

Kuno had been shortlisted for the job as far back as 2009 for its dense prey.

The snow leopard is a 'sister species' of which other cat?

Despite the name it is not a close relative of the leopard; the split from the tiger happened between 4.6 and 1.8 million years ago.

How many fatal snow leopard attacks on humans have been recorded?

Only three attacks of any kind are documented, one by a rabid animal and one by an old toothless one near Almaty.

Which mid-sized Asian cat can climb down a vertical tree trunk head first?

Its upper canines are about three times as long as the socket is wide, proportionally the longest of any living cat.

How high can a cougar leap from the ground into a tree?

It has proportionally the largest hind legs of any cat, built for the leap onto the back of a deer.

Which lion population is famous for having prides with only a single adult male?

The same Kenyan region produced the notorious 1898 man-eaters, blamed for 28 recorded railway-worker deaths.

What causes the white lion's colour?

White lions occur naturally around Kruger and Timbavati in South Africa, and are still bred in captivity.

What is the IUCN Red List status of the tiger?

The wild population fell from perhaps 5,000-8,000 in the late 1990s to an estimated 3,726-5,578 in 2022.

What is the IUCN Red List status of the cougar, the only big cat not classed as threatened?

It ranges from Yukon to Patagonia, making it the most widespread wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere.

The Champawat Tiger, shot by Jim Corbett, was blamed for how many human deaths?

She killed in Nepal and India in the early 20th century, and Corbett's account made him a household name.

What is the name of the short, soft snorting sound big cats make in friendly greeting?

Tigers and snow leopards use it constantly; it is sometimes called chuffing.

Which mid-sized cat is the sister genus to Panthera, forming an evolutionary link to the small cats?

Skull studies in the 1960s already hinted at it, and DNA later put the split at 9.3 to 4.5 million years ago.

Which of these lists correctly gives the cheetah's three main social groupings?

Females roam huge home ranges looking for prey; males hold much smaller territories where females pass through.

Hercules the liger, Guinness's largest living cat in 2013, weighed roughly how much?

He was already 408 kg at age three, when he toured the Today Show and Good Morning America in 2005.

Who coined the genus name Panthera in 1816?

Linnaeus had described the lion as Felis leo in 1758; Pocock only moved the big cats into Panthera in 1917.

The Latin word panthera, source of the genus name, originally referred to what?

The Greek panther, meanwhile, was used for spotted cats in general.

The word 'jaguar' probably comes from a Tupi-Guarani word meaning what?

Guyanese speakers add the suffix -eté to make jaguareté, 'true beast', since 'jaguar' also covers other animals.

Which North African big cats, now extinct in the wild, probably supplied Europe's first imports before the mid-1800s?

An Addis Ababa Zoo line thought to be Barbary stock turned out, on genetic testing, not to be.

The 'king cheetah', with blotchy spots merging into three dark stripes, was once believed in Zimbabwe to be a cross between which two animals?

It is in fact a rare cheetah mutation; the non-retractable claws gave it away as more specimens turned up.

The English word 'ounce', an old name for the snow leopard, ultimately derives from which Greek word?

Old French l'once was misheard as 'lonce', and the L fell off; the Latin species name uncia comes the same way.

How many recorded jaguar sightings were there in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas during the 20th century?

The species once ranged across the southern United States, and individuals still wander north from Mexico.

What proportion of wild tigers carry the genes for the white colour morph?

The many white tigers in captivity come from inbreeding, which is why the practice is controversial.

Which US law, first signed in December 2003, bans the interstate sale and transport of big cats as pets?

It covers lions, tigers, leopards, snow and clouded leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, cougars and their hybrids; 19 states ban ownership outright.

Roughly how big is the average lion pride?

Groups of up to 30 have been seen, but the core is always the related females, who do not tolerate outsiders.

Which countries prohibit all private ownership of big cats?

Austria allows them only in qualified zoos, while Russia and South Africa regulate ownership of their own native species.

Which civilisation tamed the cheetah for hunting long before Arabian and Indian rulers did?

Trained hunting cheetahs later chased antelope for rulers in Arabia and India, and Chinese emperors gave them as gifts.

What is the estimated global cheetah population, per a 2021 estimate?

That leaves it Vulnerable on the Red List, in small fragmented pockets across Africa and central Iran.

Which two Panthera species have ranges that extend into Europe, specifically Russia?

Amur tigers and Amur leopards share the Russian Far East, where winter temperatures fall to -25 °C.

A tigon is the hybrid offspring of which pairing?

It is the mirror image of the liger; the naturalist Gerald Iles wrote in 1961 that ligers seemed even rarer than tigons, though today the reverse is true.

What is the snow leopard's status on the IUCN Red List?

Fewer than 10,000 mature individuals are thought to survive, and the population is expected to fall about 10% by 2040.

How is the jaguar classified on the IUCN Red List?

Its main threats are habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching for body parts, and conflict with ranchers in Central and South America.

The cheetah is the only living member of which genus?

Joshua Brookes proposed the name in 1828; the cat had first been described in 1777 from a skin taken at the Cape of Good Hope.

Why is the clouded leopard often called a 'modern-day sabre-tooth'?

Its upper canines are about three times as long as the base of their sockets, and its skull is long and low with strong crests.

The word 'cheetah' comes via Hindi from a Sanskrit word meaning what?

The Sanskrit chitra-ya described the coat; in the past the cat was often called the 'hunting leopard'.

How many countries make up the snow leopard's range, all of which met in 2013 to plan its protection?

They stretch from Afghanistan and Bhutan through China, India and Mongolia to Russia and the Central Asian republics.

In which year was the Sunda clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra recognised as a distinct species?

Pocock had treated it as a subspecies in 1917; the island cats were isolated when a Pleistocene land bridge to the mainland was submerged.

A mythical winged snow leopard, the Aq Bars, appears on the coat of arms of which Russian republic?

The 'White Leopard' is a political symbol shared by Tatars, Kazakhs and Bulgars, and the cat is a common emblem across Central Asia.