Big Cat Animal Facts

Its pale golden coat is covered in distinctive rosettes which unlike those of the Jaguar are not filled with spots.

Big cat animal facts. They have amazingly strong necks and shoulders and are able to carry prey often heavier than themselves high up into the branches of trees where other predators cant reach. Whether your kitty meows or roars it is a descendant of the Felis silvestris species which is divided into the African wildcat European wildcat and Steppe wildcat. The puma is the big cat of the Americas.

The Lion Panthera leo is a mammal of the family Felidae and is one of four big cats in the genus Panthera. Explorers-at-Large Dereck and Beverly Joubert and the National Geographic Society founded the Big Cats Initiative in 2009 as an effort to halt the decline of big cats in the wild. The term big cat is typically used to refer to any of the five living members of the genus Panthera namely the tiger lion jaguar leopard and snow leopard as well as the non-pantherine cheetah and cougar and sometimes the clouded leopard.

At an average of 54kg the cheetah is the smallest of the big cats and is classified in a separate genus Acinonyx compared to Panthera to lions and leopards and is vulnerable to the. The Leopard is a species of big cat found in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and parts of Russia. The lion is the second largest cat after the tiger.

Males also range much further than females. Its short sleek coat varies greatly from pale straw and gray buff to bright deep ochre and chestnut and sometimes black found mostly in wetter dense forests. The five big cat species have all been assessed and categorised by the IUCN Red List.

It is similar in appearance to the Jaguar but slightly smaller with a slenderer body. Living at elevations as high as 5500 m 18000 ft the snow leopard is specially adapted to frigid high-altitude. Their territories can extend to 450sq km though in the prey-rich Mara rarely exceed 76sq km.

Despite enormous differences in size various cat species are quite similar in both structure and. At one time it ranged from the Yukon in Canada to the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America. The largest big cat is the Siberian tiger which can weigh an astonishing 660 pounds and stretch more than 10 feet nose to tail.