7. Mountain lions have the largest range of any native American cat.
Puma concolor is a cat of many names.
You might know it as a puma, a cougar, or a mountain lion — the point is that from Patagonia northward into the Yukon, we do know this impressive beast over 110 degrees of latitude and have christened it in ways that fit into our individual cultures.
Just for consistency, I’ll call it a mountain lion here.
These cats used to prowl both American continents from coast to coast, too. In old New England, for instance, some people called them painters or catamounts. As recently as 1980, you could have let Catamount Bank in Vermont handle your finances!
Which it would have done purrfectly (sorry, couldn’t resist but it’s also a good way to point out that mountain lions do purr, as many online videos will show you).
The unusual variety of names shows just how common mountain lions used to be.
Over the last two hundred years, though, the tawny feline lords of primeval forest and sun-kissed prairies have almost disappeared in eastern and parts of central North America, as has much of the forest and the prairie.
In Latin America, thanks to human activities of various types, mountain lions are hanging out on just a little more than half of their former range. (This cat’s genus label uses its Spanish name: puma.)
Vertical range is impressive, too. Pumas have been sighted at heights of up to 19,000 feet in the Andes!
The highly adaptable cats also live near sea level in places like Florida, where people call them panthers. Of note, these aren’t related to black panthers, as we’ll see in a future episode.
8. Lynxes are international.
Now, this isn’t to say that it is the same lynx species on each northern continent. Some evolution is bound to kick in whenever groups are isolated by a natural barrier.
You might be looking at a bobcat in Texas and a Canada lynx in, well, Canada, but also in Alaska and a few states in the Lower 48 (where the US border coincidentally serves more or less as the boundary between Canada lynx and bobcat ranges).
Too, you would see a Eurasian lynx in the Carpathian Mountains, and if you were really lucky, the rare and critically endangered Iberian lynx in Spain or Portugal (and only there).
But these lovely cats all have tufted ears, looong legs, a really short tail, huge paws, and (for some reason) a goblin-like face framed in a furry ruff. That’s not a scientific definition, obviously, but these are some of the features shared by all members of the genus Lynx.
More specifically:
- Lynx lynx. I like the sound of “lynx.” Apparently so did the taxonomists who gave the Eurasian lynx its scientific name. This big bruiser is up to four times as large as Fluffy and weighs twice as much as a Canada lynx, throwing its weight around northern Eurasia all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific and for another two thousand miles southward into the Himalayas. While all of these cats are under thirty inches tall, Lynx lynx (there we go again!) is big enough to take down deer and reindeer.
- Lynx canadiensis: Canada lynx are in it for the snowshoe hare. Seriously: hares make up 97% of their diet and the Canada Lynx range is almost identical to the snowshoe hare’s. The hares go through a boom-bust cycle every eight to eleven years, and so does the Canada Lynx. You know which other lynx has a taste for bunnies?
- Lynx pardinus. Iberian lynxes LOVE to munch on the rabbits of southwestern Europe, so much so that when a nasty disease killed off most of those rabbits in the late twentieth century, the Iberian lynx faded away, going from thousands to one or two hundred on the Iberian Peninsula in 2011. Intense conservation efforts have since reversed that Extinction Express, but this gorgeous lynx is still THE most endangered cat in the world.
- Lynx rufus. Residents of the United States and Mexico might be surprised to hear that “wildcats” are lynxes (more about that term in the next episode). Get ready for another cool fact — genetic testing shows bobcats to be the oldest lynx species, going back as much as five million years to Pliocene times. All the other lynxes are young Pleistocene whippersnappers, compared to the old coot, Bob Cat. One trait that has probably helped Bob keep on keepin’ on down through geologic time is adaptability — for instance, the ability to live near people in urban settings like Tucson, Arizona.
One of today’s big cats might be feeling very nostalgic for the good old Pleistocene days…
9. Lions might once have been international, too.
Lions prowled across all northern continents in the ice ages. Or not.
Evidence on this is nowhere near as clear-cut as with lynxes, and not all paleontologists are on board with the idea.
It depends on how a researcher chooses to define “lion.”
Well, duh, you might be thinking — just look at Africa! Just look at the cave paintings!
The problem is that scientists must thoroughly think matters like this through (it’s in their job description), and they disagree on some important points when it comes to the lion family tree.
The critter known to Academia as Panthera atrox is called an “American lion” by many scientists and all of us laypeople who care about fossil cats.
There is indeed evidence that supports P. atrox’s lionhood. But some paleontologists make a good case for that fossil predator actually being an ancestral jaguar!
None of us laypeople need lose any sleep over that. We only should know that, besides sabertooths, a very big cat — possibly a lion — terrorized North America during the last ice age.
Why should we know this? Because it’s cool!
Scientists, on the other hand, have to be picky in order to see exactly how cats evolved — to them, ancestral “lion” or “jaguar” is a huge deal.
Let’s just say that lions could have existed in North America for tens of thousands of years, at the same time as their relatives in Europe did.
Those relatives included cave lions, of course, and we have a little more evidence on them because early humans were handy with the charcoal and pigments.
At Chauvet Cave, artwork shows maneless male lions with reddish coats. If these are true to life, then this was a different species from the lions we know and love (at a safe distance) today.
Cave lions were much heavier, too. Some researchers estimate their weight at over 900 pounds!
But the evolutionary path that connects them to P. atrox (if the “lion” idea is correct) and to today’s P. leo is still a mystery.
Everyone does agree that today’s lions once had a much broader range than they do today, perhaps all the way from Africa to Eurasia and North America.
Such big cats create problems for us, as we do for them. Perhaps with conservation their range across Earth might get a little broader again — in the future in ways that allow them and us to coexist, keeping up the balance of nature all around.
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Flight To Wonder 