Forty-plus English names chase one wide-ranging American cat
Puma concolor—cougar, puma, mountain lion, catamount, panther—holds a Guinness record for most names, over forty in English alone. Its wild range is the widest of any terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, from Yukon toward the southern Andes.
The cougar has the widest range of any wild land mammal in the Americas, stretching across 110 degrees of latitude from Canada’s Yukon to the southern Andes, and lives from lowland forest to deserts and open country up to 5,800 metres. Hunting after European colonisation and spreading settlement wiped it from most of eastern North America by the early 20th century, apart from the Florida panther, yet it is now recolonising the Midwest, and young cats were seen around the Great Lakes in 2025 and 2026.
It is the fourth-largest cat. Males are about 2.4 m from nose to tail and usually weigh 53 to 72 kg, females 34 to 48 kg, and animals grow larger away from the equator; the heaviest reliably recorded, shot in 1901, weighed 105.2 kg. It has the biggest hind legs, relative to size, of any cat, and can leap 5.5 m up into a tree. It cannot roar, but it is the largest cat that purrs. Kittens are born spotted, with blue eyes and ringed tails.
A solitary, territorial ambush hunter, it takes mostly deer but also rodents, and times its activity around other predators, prey, livestock, and people. It usually avoids humans; fatal attacks are rare, though they rose as farms pushed into its habitat.
Genetics suggests North America’s cougars died out around 10,000 years ago with the Pleistocene megafauna and were replaced by migrants from South America. A cougar dropping from Argentina’s Catamarca Province is around 17,000 years old. Linnaeus described it in 1771 from a Brazilian cat, and puma entered English from Quechua via Spanish in 1777.
Source: Cougar
