Puma

Puma:

The pyoo'm or cougar koo'gr, New World member of the cat family, Felis concolor. Also known as mountain lion, catamount, panther, and painter, it ranges from S British Columbia to the southern tip of South America. It is slenderly built, with a lionlike face.



There is great variation both in size and in color, and, at the extremes of their geographic range are much larger than those of the tropics.

Adult males of the cooler regions average about 7 ft (2.1 m) in length, including the 30-in. (76-cm) tail, and about 28 in. (71 cm) in shoulder height; they weigh up to 175 lb (80 kg).

Females are smaller. The fur is yellow-brown, red-brown, or gray; they are distinguished from the other large New World cat, the jaguar, by its lack of spots.

Being found in almost every type of country, including mountain tops, grasslands, deserts, and temperate and tropical forests.

In North America it has largely disappeared from the eastern two thirds of the continent, except for a few survivors in Florida; there was a confirmed sighting of one in N Vermont in 1994.

They avoid contact with humans and rarely attack them. They are classified in the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, class Mammalia, order Carnivora, family Felidae.

Mountian Lion

The cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, painter because of its black tail tip, and mountain screamer.

The cougar holds the world record for the animal with the highest number of names due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone. This cat is the largest of the small cats. It is placed in the subfamily Felinae, although its bulk characteristics are similar to those of the big cats in the subfamily Pantherinae. The family Felidae is believed to have originated in Asia approximately 11 million years ago. This cat migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas approximately 8 to 8.5 million years ago. The lineages subsequently diverged in that order. North American felids then invaded South America 3 Ma ago as part of the Great American Interchange, following formation of the Isthmus of Panama. The cougar was originally thought to belong in Felis, the genus which includes the domestic cat, but it is now placed in Puma along with the jaguarundi, a cat just a little more than a tenth its weight.

Studies have indicated that the cougar and jaguarundi are most closely related to the modern cheetah of Africa and western Asia, but the relationship is unresolved. It has been suggested that the cheetah lineage diverged from the Puma lineage in the Americas and migrated back to Asia and Africa, while other research suggests the cheetah diverged in the Old World itself.

Recent studies have demonstrated a high level of genetic similarity among the North American cougar populations, suggesting that they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group. Culver et al. suggest that the original North American population of Puma concolor was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals such as Smilodon also disappeared. North America was then repopulated by a group of South American cougars.

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