Abstract
Two big cat skulls procured from hunters of Yanachaga National Park, Peru, were reported as those of cats informally dubbed the ‘striped tiger’ and ‘anomalous jaguar’. Observations suggested that both skulls were distinct from those of jaguars, associated descriptions of integument did not conform to this species, and it has been implied that both represent members of one or two novel species. We sought to resolve the identity of the skulls using morphometrics. DNA could not be retrieved since both had been boiled as part of the defleshing process. We took 36 cranial and 13 mandibular measurements and added them to a database incorporating nearly 300 specimens of over 30 felid species. Linear discriminant analysis resolved both specimens as part of Panthera onca with high probabilities for cranial and mandibular datasets. Furthermore, the specimens exhibit characters typical of jaguars. If the descriptions of their patterning and pigmentation are accurate, we assume that both individuals were aberrant.
Highlights
The continued existence of undiscovered, large (>10 kg), terrestrial mammal species in the extant fauna is not beyond possibility, despite the expectation that all remaining undiscovered mammals are predominantly small
Using discriminant functions from the cranial dataset, both Peruvian cats were classified as Panthera onca with posterior probabilities of ∼1
Prediction accuracy is lower in the mandibular dataset, though discriminant functions classified both specimens as P. onca with posterior probabilities of 0.998 for the ‘anomalous Jaguar’ and 0.961 for the ‘Peruvian tiger’
Summary
The continued existence of undiscovered, large (>10 kg), terrestrial mammal species in the extant fauna is not beyond possibility, despite the expectation that all remaining undiscovered mammals are predominantly small. Of those large-bodied, terrestrial mammal species named recently, all inhabit tropical forests in southeast Asia, South America and New Guinea. Some or most were known to local people prior to scientific discovery. Examples include the Kipunji Rungwecebus kipunji, discovered in 2006 following observations of a mystery monkey (Beckman, 2005; Jones et al, 2005), and Burmese snub-nosed monkey Rhinopithecus strykeri, discovered in 2010 following investigation of local reports about a “monkey with an upturned nose” (Geissmann et al, 2010)
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