Cougar vs Panther?

VS

The other day I was talking to a friend about Mountain lions on the West coast of the U.S. and she asked what the difference between a mountain lion and a cougar was. I said that they were the same thing and that in fact I'd heard the mountain lion called by a number of different names: cougar, panther, mountain lion, puma, wildcat, etc. She was confused when I mentioned panther. She asked if it's the same as the African panther and I had no clue. I figured they could be the same, just different morphologies.

The google search

My first search for "what is a mountain lion" - I know, not super creative, but hey, it worked - brought up trusty old wikipedia as the second finding. Interestingly, the wikipedia entry was the one for cougar. It appears that, at least for wikipedia folks, mountain lions are most properly termed cougars. ;) A quick look at the wikipedia entry confirmed the confusion with names. Apparently, mountain lions actually hold the Guiness record for animal with the highest number of names - although I wasn't able to confirm it on the Guiness website...

From the wikipedia article I found the taxonomy of the mountain lion and it turns out that it's a member of the Puma genus. Another funny thing about them is that they are supposedly more closely related to the domestic cat than to the larger cats such as lions or tigers. This of course led me to search for what a panther is. Here's my very rough and quick summary:

The word Panther, typically refers to black panthers which are melanistic (black color variant) versions of jaguars (in Latin America) and leopards (in Asia/Africa).

This fella here

Both jaguars and leopards are members of the genus Panthera - hence the panther name - which is a genus that includes the big cat species, lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars. Mountain lions are members of the Puma genus, as I mentioned above, and as such, are not the same as panthers.

Gratuitous cool mountain lion picture

There have been some supposed historical siting of melanistic versions of the mountain lion, which may have led to the use of the term panther. One of the things that distinguishes the members of the genus panthera from members of the genus puma (of which there are apparently only two species) is that the large cats (panthera) are able to roar, while mountain lions produce a high pitched shrieking sound instead and this is how the two genus are split up.

So that's your lesson in panthers and mountain lions for today. I hope you've enjoyed. =)


Here are some cool websites to check out if you'd like to learn more about the largest of the small cat species and the fourth largest cat in the world!

- National Geographic website
- San Diego Zoo website