The only Acinonyx still outsprints every other land mammal
Cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) are pursuit cats clocked at 93–104 km/h (58–65 mph), the fastest land animals. Four subspecies live in Africa and central Iran; an African line returned to India in 2022. Populations now cling mainly to fragmented ranges.
Everything about the cheetah serves acceleration: powerful hind-leg muscles, a long lower spine, and claws that retract only partly. Its genus name Acinonyx probably blends Greek words for motionless and nail, a nod to those claws, while cheetah itself comes through Hindi and Urdu from a Sanskrit word meaning painted or variegated, apt for the evenly spaced black spots on tawny fur and the dark tear streaks down the face. Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber named it Felis jubatus in 1777 from a skin collected at the Cape of Good Hope.
Social life splits three ways: mothers with cubs, male coalitions, and lone males. Females roam widely after prey, whereas males hold compact territories where food and females are plentiful. Hunting happens by day, peaking at dawn and dusk, and targets animals mostly under 40 kilograms, especially impala, springbok and Thomson's gazelles. Its closest living relatives are the cougar and the jaguarundi, and the oldest cheetah fossils, from eastern and southern Africa, are 3.5 to 3 million years old.
Genetic poverty compounds the danger. Two bottlenecks, roughly 100,000 and 12,000 years ago, left variation at about 0.1 to 4 percent of a typical species, below even inbred domestic cats and dogs, which hampers captive breeding. The rare king cheetah, blotched and marked with three dark stripes along its back, was proposed as a separate species by Reginald Pocock in 1927; a 2012 study traced the pattern to a recessive mutation in the same gene that gives tabby cats their stripes. Habitat loss, conflict with people, poaching and disease weigh on the roughly 6,517 mature adults counted in 2021, and the IUCN lists the species as Vulnerable. Cheetahs were tamed in ancient Egypt and trained to hunt in Arabia and India.
Source: Cheetah
