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The only cat that kills by biting through the skull.
Most big cats suffocate their prey at the throat. Jaguars puncture the braincase between the ears, or the cervical vertebrae, and the animal is dead before it registers contact. The skull is short and deep, the jaw musculature enormous for the body size, and the technique lets a jaguar take armoured prey — caiman, turtle, armadillo — that would defeat a lion.
They swim well and hunt willingly in water, which matters because the strongest remaining populations sit in the Pantanal and the Amazon basin. The species is not yet scarce so much as it is being cut into pieces: the conservation work is corridor work, keeping the Mesoamerican and Amazonian populations connected across ranchland where a jaguar near cattle is usually a dead jaguar.
The open shelf
More frames of the jaguar
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