Nikola Chavkosk
Well-Known Member
I read mostly on Wikipedia. I know that it's not everything true, but I believe Wikipedia as they are basing their text on several different sources. Yet they are the most popular encyclopedia.
Are there generic leopards in zoos?
- Thread starter Nikola Chavkosk
- Start date
I read mostly on Wikipedia. I know that it's not everything true, but I believe Wikipedia as they are basing their text on several different sources. Yet they are the most popular encyclopedia.
Nikola Chavkosk
Well-Known Member
You surely know that a hyena is closer related to felids, including jaguars, than to canids like african hunting dog? Altough its appearance is more simmilar to canid one. The Felids, Hyenas&Aardwolf and Civets/Genets/Binturong (Viveridae), and Herpestidae (Meerkat, Mongoose) belong do Feliformia - ''cat like''
Jaguars and hyenas have strong jaw, among other animals
Last edited:
Nikola Chavkosk
Well-Known Member
Giant Panda, this research, your, it is in accordance to informations on Wikipedia, namely the Phylogenetic trees for big cat divergence are same on both Wikipedia and your stated research. So once again, leopards and lions (and jaguars) are more closer related each other than to tigers. And the snow leopard is almost as distant to leopards, lions, and jaguars, as tiger is to them, according to the tree. But we can't say that the tiger and snow leopard are more closely related each other than to the rest panterine cats, accodring to tree.
They all have strong jaws, but I meant the jaguar exceptionally more so (like cracking turtle shells and consuming thick-skinned crocodilians).
Wikipedia can be a good starting point, but (at the risk of stating the obvious) I'd be wary of trusting it completely. Having just read the big cat article, it appears to in fact be based on only one source:
Davis, B. W., Li, G., & Murphy, W. J. (2010). Supermatrix and species tree methods resolve phylogenetic relationships within the big cats, Panthera (Carnivora: Felidae). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, 56(1), 64-76.
You may note this sentence in the abstract: "Despite multiple publications on the subject, no two molecular studies have reconstructed Panthera with the same topology." Whilst this study gives perhaps the most likely evolutionary tree, it also found that several lineages probably interbred after divergence. That means different parts of the genome could give different answers, so it wouldn't be at all surprising if whole-genome comparisons (ie. more data) proved their tree wrong.
Nikola Chavkosk
Well-Known Member
I perfectly understand what you are saying and also the tree, thus I wrote in already mentioned sentence - the snow leopard is ALMOST as distant to the trio as tiger is, and that we can't say that the tiger and snow leopard are more closely related each other than to the trio (lion, leopard and jaguar). Maybe I have some wrong expressions because English it's not my mother tongue, that is.
I’m confusing myself here (it's late) but that’s not what the tree on Wikipedia says. The Wikipedia tree groups snow leopards and tigers, putting them as closer relatives than snow leopards are to the other big cats. The study I cited gives the tree you describe, with snow leopards closer to lions, leopards and jaguars.
Last edited:
Nikola Chavkosk
Well-Known Member
Actually on Wikipedia, the tree denotes (as I understand) that tigers are more closer related to jaguars, lions and leopards than to snow leopards, but that, of them, the tigers and jaguars are more closer related to snow leopards than the newest member of Panthera - lions and leopards (wich appeared the most recently)? And that jaguars are more closer related to lions and leopards than to tigers of corse. What do you think, I am not zoologist, thought.
I'am writing about the tree here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera
That explains it - I thought you were referring to the phylogeny on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_cat
The Panthera tree is actually based on morphology (from a study with some fairly low bootstrap values), but also gives a different result to both the one I cited and the other Wikipedia article. Your interpretation is not entirely correct; in fact, all four of the other cat species are equally closely related to snow leopards. Lions and leopards may have diverged from each other later, but they diverged from the snow leopard lineage at the same time as tigers and jaguars.
My thoughts remain the same: all these divergence events occurred within a relatively short time and were likely followed by some degree of interbreeding. That makes it very difficult to reconstruct the tree, hence a comparative genomics study is necessary to assert these relationships with any real confidence. Having said that, I think this phylogeny is the most likely, with closer relatives sharing the same brackets: ((tiger,snow leopard)(jaguar(leopard,lion))).
This is not the most productive bump, but this is the only place I'd heard until recently about the Amur Leopard SSP being non-purebred as a result of North Chinese Leopard genes -- what irony then that in the last year the Amur Leopard and North Chinese Leopard have been reclassified together, as covered in the Taxonomy thread... in which case we would ironically be back to a pure SSP, and the North Chinese breeding population at the Feline Center could be integrated with the Amur Leopard SSP.
I wouldn't jump the gun on that. Some of the taxonomy on that update, particularly in regards to the big cats seems to have been getting contested quite a bit. Tigers they certainly got wrong, and Leopards I'm not putting money on being resolved until somebody actually does a real inclusive study on the African populations. japonensis may very well be a synonym of orientalis- I hope it is- but I'm waiting for a more conclusive study to be done.
~Thylo
I absolutely agree with you, and in the old 'Tiger Species' thread I've been one of the main skeptics of the Tiger strategy, and there's ongoing questions about which genetic markers are most identifiable; but the report seemed to admit most leopards needed more research, which is more than was said for lions or tigers, both of which were stated in a more conclusive tone by the authors.
I just found the irony that North Chinese had accidentally been involved in the Amur genetic pool a little funny in that context.