Status
Habitat
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Group
One animal, forty names, and a range from the Yukon to Patagonia.
Cougar, mountain lion, panther, catamount, onça-parda: the sheer number of common names is a record of how many separate human landscapes this cat lives in. It holds the greatest latitudinal range of any wild terrestrial mammal in the hemisphere, from boreal Canada to the southern tip of Chile, and does it without any specialised morphology at all.
Structurally it belongs with the small cats, not the great ones. The hyoid is fully ossified, so it purrs and screams but never roars. Where pumas are removed, deer browse concentrates along watercourses and the streamside vegetation collapses — one of the better-documented cases of a predator holding a riverbank together.
The open shelf
More frames of the puma
Streamed live from the Commons Quality Images archive, eighteen at a time. Tap any frame to study it — each remains its photographer’s.
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Developing the next eighteen…
