Snow leopard fossil found in Europe

DesertRhino150

DesertRhino150

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15+ year member
A complete mandible from a leopard-sized cat found in the early Middle Pleistocene Arago Cave has now been identified to be a new palaeosubspecies of the snow leopard, called Panthera uncia pyrenaica.

The mandible has many features in common with snow leopards, but has unexpectedly small canine teeth which has confused the identity - the fossil has previously also been assigned to the leopard.

This is one of only two snow leopard fossils ever found with the other, a late Middle Pleistocene fossil from China, perfectly bridging the morphological gap between the Arago snow leopard and the modern Asian animal.

The full paper can be found below:
An intriguing find of an early Middle Pleistocene European snow leopard, Panthera uncia pyrenaica ssp. nov. (Mammalia, Carnivora, Felidae), from the Arago cave (Tautavel, Pyrénées-Orientales, France) - Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments
 
This is a really interesting discovery, I wonder when they became extinct in Europe.
 
This is a fascinating and not to mention unexpected find! Thank you for sharing this with us @DesertRhino150 I wonder if any dental microwear analysis has been done on this specimen... I am also wondering what its diet would have consisted of, perhaps it co-existed with Pyrenean chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica) or Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaicus pyrenaicus).
 
What an incredible find! Just goes to show you how much larger some animals distributions were. I wonder if tiger fossils will be found in Europe. (Likely not, but who knows)

Speaking of which, I'd like to see new isotopic tests done on cave lions in the future.
 
A new scientific paper has been published recently about the evolution of the snow leopard, which has changed some things from the earlier discovery.

The French fossil mentioned above, from the early stage of the Middle Pleistocene, is now considered its own species, Panthera pyrenaica. However, a fossil discovered in the early 2000s in central Portugal, dating to the late Pleistocene, has been identified as a unique European paleosubspecies of the extant snow leopard, Panthera uncia lusitana.

Panthera pyrenaica seems to have not been overly adapted to cooler environments, while P. u. lusitana shared the needs of modern snow leopards - rather than being adapted to high altitudes, snow leopards instead have a reliance on cold climates and rocky terrain. The extant snow leopard only colonised Europe after the middle Pleistocene when its main caprid prey, the ibexes and now-extinct European tahrs, also colonised from Asia.

An article about the research can be read here.

The scientific paper can be read here.
 
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