leopards

The leopard (''Panthera pardus'') is one of the five extant species in the genus ''Panthera'', a member of the cat family, Felidae. It occurs in a wide range in sub-Saharan Africa, in some parts of Western and Central Asia, Southern Russia, and on the Indian subcontinent to Southeast and East Asia. It is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List because leopard populations are threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation, and are declining in large parts of the global range. The leopard is considered locally extinct in Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Jordan, Morocco, Togo, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Kuwait, Syria, Libya, Tunisia and most likely in North Korea, Gambia, Laos, Lesotho, Tajikistan, Vietnam and Israel.
Contemporary records suggest that the leopard occurs in only 25% of its historical global range.

Compared to other wild cats, the leopard has relatively short legs and a long body with a large skull. Its fur is marked with rosettes. It is similar in appearance to the jaguar (''Panthera onca''), but has a smaller, lighter physique, and its rosettes are generally smaller, more densely packed and without central spots. Both leopards and jaguars that are melanistic are known as black panthers. The leopard is distinguished by its well-camouflaged fur, opportunistic hunting behaviour, broad diet, strength, and its ability to adapt to a variety of habitats ranging from rainforest to steppe, including arid and montane areas. It can run at speeds of up to . The earliest known leopard fossils excavated in Europe are estimated 600,000 years old, dating to the late Early Pleistocene. Leopard fossils were also found in Sumatra, Taiwan and Japan.

Etymology

The English name 'leopard' comes from fro, leupart or frm, liepart, that derives from la, leopardus and grc, λέοπάρδος (''leopardos''). ''Leopardos'' could be a compound of (''leōn''), meaning lion, and (''pardos''), meaning spotted. The word ''λέοπάρδος'' originally referred to a cheetah (''Acinonyx jubatus'').

'Panther' is another common name, derived from la, panther and grc, πάνθηρ (''pánthēr''); The generic name ''Panthera'' originates in la, panthera, which refers to a hunting net for catching wild beasts that were used by the Romans in combats. ''Pardus'' is the masculine singular form.

Characteristics

The leopard's fur is generally soft and thick, notably softer on the belly than on the back. Its skin colour varies between individuals from pale yellowish to dark golden with dark spots grouped in rosettes. Its belly is whitish and its ringed tail is shorter than its body. Its pupils are round. Leopards living in arid regions are pale cream, yellowish to ochraceous and rufous in colour; those living in forests and mountains are much darker and deep golden. Spots fade toward the white underbelly and the insides and lower parts of the legs. Rosettes are circular in East African leopard populations, and tend to be squarish in Southern African and larger in Asian leopard populations. The fur tends to be grayish in colder climates, and dark golden in rain forest habitats. The pattern of the rosettes is unique in each individual. This pattern is thought to be an adaptation to dense vegetation with patchy shadows, where it serves as camouflage.

Its white-tipped tail is about long, white underneath and with spots that form incomplete bands toward the tail's end.
The guard hairs protecting the basal hairs are short, in face and head, and increase in length toward the flanks and the belly to about . Juveniles have woolly fur, and appear to be dark-coloured due to the densely arranged spots.
Its fur tends to grow longer in colder climates.
The leopard's rosettes differ from those of the jaguar (''Panthera onca''), which are darker and with smaller spots inside.

The leopard has a diploid chromosome number of 38.
The chromosomes include four acrocentric, five metacentric, seven submetacentric and two telocentric pairs.

Size and weight

The leopard is sexually dimorphic with males larger and heavier than females. It is slender and muscular, with relatively short limbs and a broad head. Males stand at the shoulder, while females are tall. The head-and-body length ranges between with a long tail. Sizes vary geographically. Males weigh , and females .
Some leopards in North Africa allegedly were as large as Barbary lions (''Panthera leo leo''). In 1913, an Algerian newspaper reported a leopard killed that allegedly measured about in total length.
The maximum weight of a wild leopard in Southern Africa was about . It measured . An Indian leopard killed in Himachal Pradesh in 2016 measured with an estimated weight of ; it was perhaps the largest known wild leopard in India.

The largest skull of a leopard was recorded in India in 1920 and measured in basal length, in breadth, and weighed . The skull of an African leopard measured in basal length, and in breadth, and weighed .

Variant colouration

Melanistic leopards are also called black panthers. Melanism in leopards is caused by a recessive allele and inherited as a recessive trait. Interbreeding in melanistic leopards produces a significantly smaller litter size than is produced by normal pairings.
The black leopard is common foremost in tropical and subtropical moist forests like the equatorial rainforest of the Malay Peninsula and the tropical rainforest on the slopes of some African mountains such as Mount Kenya.
Between January 1996 and March 2009, leopards were photographed at 16 sites in the Malay Peninsula in a sampling effort of more than 1,000 camera trap nights. Of the 445 photographs of melanistic leopards, 410 were taken in study sites south of the Kra Isthmus, where the non-melanistic morph was never photographed. These data indicate the near-fixation of the dark allele in the region. The expected time for the fixation of this recessive allele due to genetic drift alone ranged from about 1,100 years to about 100,000 years. Pseudomelanistic leopards have also been reported.

In India, nine pale and white leopards were reported between 1905 and 1967.
Leopards exhibiting erythrism were recorded between 1990 and 2015 in South Africa's Madikwe Game Reserve and in Mpumalanga. The cause of this morph known as a "strawberry leopard" or "pink panther" is not well understood.

Taxonomy

''Felis pardus'' was the scientific name proposed by Carl Linnaeus in 1758.
The generic name ''Panthera'' was first used by Lorenz Oken in 1816, who included all the known spotted cats into this group.
Oken's classification was not widely accepted, and ''Felis'' or ''Leopardus'' was used as the generic name until the early 20th century.

The leopard was designated as the type species of ''Panthera'' by Joel Asaph Allen in 1902.
In 1917, Reginald Innes Pocock also subordinated the tiger (''P. tigris''), lion (''P. leo''), and jaguar (''P. onca'') to ''Panthera''.

Subspecies

Following Linnaeus' first description, 27 leopard subspecies were proposed by naturalists between 1794 and 1956. Since 1996, only eight subspecies have been considered valid on the basis of mitochondrial analysis. Later analysis revealed a ninth valid subspecies, the Arabian leopard.

In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the Cat Specialist Group recognized the following eight subspecies as valid taxa:

Results of an analysis of molecular variance and pairwise fixation index of 182 African leopard museum specimens showed that some African leopards exhibit higher genetic differences than Asian leopard subspecies.

Evolution

Results of phylogenetic studies based on nDNA and mtDNA analysis showed that the last common ancestor of the ''Panthera'' and ''Neofelis'' genera is thought to have lived about . ''Neofelis'' diverged about from the ''Panthera'' lineage. The tiger diverged about , followed by the snow leopard about and the leopard about . The leopard is a sister taxon to a clade within ''Panthera'', consisting of the lion and the jaguar.

Results of a phylogenetic analysis of chemical secretions amongst cats indicated that the leopard is closely related to the lion.
The geographic origin of the ''Panthera'' is most likely northern Central Asia. The leopard-lion clade was distributed in the Asian and African Palearctic since at least the early Pliocene

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