Seattlest Pix: 07Mar02

According to Oxford Reference Online Premium, which I accessed for free with my Seattle Public Library card, the Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd Edition Revised) says:



panther (noun)

a leopard, especially a black one.

• (N. Amer.) a puma or a jaguar.

- ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French pantere, from Latin panthera, from Greek panthr. In Latin, pardus ‘leopard’ also existed; the two terms led to confusion: until the mid 19th cent. many taxonomists regarded the panther and the leopard as separate species.

There's no way that could be considered a cheetah. Cheetahs have solid spots; Jaguars and Leopards have rosettes. See

www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbyte...

lioncrusher.com/animal.asp?ani...

There are melanistic (black) variants of both the Jaguar and the Leopard but not the Cheetah (though it does have a "tabby" or "King" variant).

"Puma" is a genus that contains the Cougar and the Jaguarundi. "Panther" is an imprecise term that gets applied regionally to different species on different continents: a "Panther" is a leopard (in Asia and Africa), a cougar (in North America), or a jaguar (South and Central America). Since the picture depicts an "animal" with rosettes of indeterminate species, "Panther" is pretty much exactly correct.

(This is easily the most pedantic I've ever been in the presence of a naked breast, btw)

"Panther" is a catchall term for leopards, cheetahs, and pumas, so apparently it applies.

Shouldn't this be "Domestic Cheetah"? I thought panthers were black.