ExtinctZoo - America Might Soon Have A New Big Cat Species

Episode Date: July 19, 2026

Watch out mountain lions, there's a new cat in town

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Every once in a while, a trail camera bolted to a random mesquite tree in southern Arizona, turns on in the middle of the night, snaps a single photo, and sends the whole world, well, the very specific subsection that cares about zoology, into somewhat of an uproar. And before anyone asks, no, it's not Bigfoot and it's not a chupacabra. Though, to be honest, if either of those turned up in Arizona, I don't think any of us would be that shocked. Now, what the photo actually shows is an honest-to-goodness, rosette-covered, thick-necked, absolute unit of a cat.

In other words, a jaguar. A cat that is not only significantly larger than a mountain lion, the U.S.'s largest current cat, but is also the biggest, and dare I say deadliest, terrestrial apex predator south of the border. And it is seemingly invading the U.S. Or so one might think. In reality, this cat is no invader,

but rather a long-lost child, if you will. or kitten. And to understand why you have to wind back a lot further than the nearest border checkpoint, all the way back to a time before there were borders and before there was in Arizona. Crazy, I know. A time when jaguars are strutting around North America like they own the place, which to be fair for the better part of a million years, they kind of did, at least partially. When most people picture a jaguar, they picture the Amazon. But the cat's history on the continent runs a lot deeper and a lot colder than that. During the Pleistocene, and thus Ice Age, Jaguars weren't some tropical cat stuck down south.

They lived all over across big chunks of both the western and eastern United States. In spots, the you never in a hundred years can act with a giant spotted cat. For example, we pulled what seems to be jaguar bones out of cave deposits in Tennessee, and separately when researchers sequenced the mitochondrial genome of these apparent North American jaguars, the answer came back almost boringly clear, which is that its DNA set right inside the range of jaguars alive today. meaning these weren't some separate ice-aged look-like, they were indeed jaguars, just a good deal chunkier, being big enough as scientists filed the northern ones under their own name, Pentaere-onka Augusta. And these findings change the whole framing, as it's not really about some invasive, deadly species sneaking into the states,

it's rather about a once-native cat returning to its birthright, so to speak. But the animal itself deserves a proper look first, because even the modern jaguar, despite not being as big as its prehistoric ancestors, are straight-up, Still different. Like I said, it's a big cat, being the largest in the entire western hemisphere, with most adults running between 56 to 96 kilos or 123 to 12 pounds. But that's not even the max, as the absolute units down in the southern parts of the ranges can shove well past that, with the largest specimens coming in at around 158 kilograms

or 348 pounds, so bigger than a lioness. And unlike the long-legged cats of the old world, the jaguars built like a stocky powerlifter, a front-loaded muscle, a ludicrously broad skull, and a set of jaws that are, frankly, kind of overkill, overkill if they were like the other big cats. Because, you see, most big cats kill kind of politely, let's say, meowing pleas, clamping onto the throat, and waiting a few long minutes until the prey suffocates. The jaguar, on the other hand, does not believe that patience is a virtue, and so instead it just bites clean straight through the skull, punching its canines directly through bone, and into the oh-so-soft, ooey-goo-goo-goodness within. In other words, the brain.

And this hunting technique, if you will, is reflected by the fact that pound for pound, it's got the strongest bite of any big cat alive. Having a bite for us for around 5,000 newtons of the canines and 7,000 newtons of the carnassials, which is enough to crack a turtle shell and punch right through the armored skull of a cayman. So all things considered, we should probably count ourselves lucky that these things have never really looked at us and seen us at dinner. And speaking of seeing, its coat with all those arringered rosettes might look like pure decoration, But they actually earn their keep, because in broken light, where sun and shade fall in patches

around the forest floor, the code helps the background match the environment and also likely break up the cat's outline to erase the massive apex predator from view until it's way too late to do anything about it, which is probably earlier than you might think. And fun fact, the quote-unquote panther, in other words, a melanistic jaguar, is more frequently found in areas with dense vegetation, likely as an adaptation for increased shadow coverage due to lack of light. And this camouflage overall is a big part to what everyone pictures the jaguar, pun intended, as a creature of the deep jungle in the first place, calling them a jungle cat. But that, my friends, is actually a disservice.

Because, sure, while lots of jaguars do live in the rainforest, with more than half of the species range sitting in the Amazon basin, they are nowhere near rainforest only. They'll set up shop in dry forest, thorn scrub, flooded grasslands, and even mountains, being able to hang on in places that look about as far away from a jungle as you can get, save a literal sandy desert. And surviving somewhere that harsh comes down to one thing that sounds simple, but out here is, well, the difference between survival and death, and that's being able to move.

You see, where Jaguars are invading into the U.S., falls into an ecoregion, colloquially known as the Sky Islands, which basically means isolated mountains where the highlands and lowlands differ significantly in biome, with these mountains essentially acting as forest oases and an otherwise blistering hot and dry lowland. And importantly, they're called Sky Islands, because each one is often cut off from the next by a wide moat of said hot freaking ground. Basically, a real life, the floor is lava situation. Now, a single male's territory can sprawl past 100 square kilometers or about 40 square miles,

and it usually overlaps with a small ranges of several females, which matters way more than it probably sounds, but we'll get back to that. And so in the sky island, to work that much ground, a cat has a cross open country with little to no cover, often with big. brutal heat, and sporadic water sources. Thankfully, our kitty cats are up to the challenge, as jaguars, perhaps contrary to popular belief, do not need a tropical river around every bend. Instead, what they do need though is a landscape connected well enough that it provides

enough prey to support it, enough variability in coverage, i.e., not pure shrubbery, and of course the ability to reach water when it has to. So when you snip too many of these connections, and you fragment the different aspects which are needed, this place just kind of stops working for the jaguar. Now it probably doesn't come as a surprise is me telling you that humans have a long history of messing things up for the rest of the animal kingdom. But a lot of that damage is more collateral, let's say. Habitat paved over, prey wiped out, that kind of thing.

The Jaguar though, that's a different story, because messing it up was on purpose. Starting around the early 20th century, the federal government basically ran an organized war on large predators, with the Bureau of Biological Survey and its predatory Animal and rodent control program hiring trappers to wipe out wolves, grizzlies, mountain lions, and jaguars to make the land safe for cattle. While then counties and individuals also piled on bounties and paid cold hard cash for a dead jaguar scalp. And then, of course, just as a cherry on top, we also had sport hunters after pelts and

individual ranchers guarding livestock. So it should come as no surprise that by the 1960s, the American Jaguar was all but gone. And yet, with all of them... You know that moment when everything... feels in sync, that's Bacardi's vibe. Canada's number one white rum, a rum born from a rhythm, set to a soundtrack of laughs, loud music,

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Tap the banner to shop now. Live passionately, drink responsibly. They just kept coming back and back and back. Isolated cases, yes, but still. And the one who turned these rare cases into a national story actually has a name. Back in 2011, a young male slipped across the border and settled into the Santa Rita Mountains just south of Tucson. And after a vote, a group of school kids christened him El Hefe, or the boss. For years, he was the only known wild jaguar in the entire U.S. after the demise of Macho B, which yes was a real jaguar theme,

a cool one at that and thus basically el hafe carried the whole species presence north of the border on his back so talk about built differently but then one day he was just gone he vanished from arizona's cameras in the fall of 2015 and it was only months later that the wider world actually met him when conservationists released and now famous 41 second clip of him musling through a creek bed and by the time he was a domestic celebrity the boss himself was gone and for seven long years, nobody had any clue where he was, or if he was even alive. Until 2021, that is, when conservationists in Mexico picked him out on a camera in central Sonora, roughly 120 miles south where he'd last been seen.

So an aging cat who'd crossed the international border at least twice and lived to tell the tale. Now, I will say, though, sadly we're not aware of his whereabouts anymore, and considering the advanced age, the boss might no longer be with us. Rest in peace, if that's the case. Now, with all this said, El Hefe was the most famous, but he's not the only one. As for the last 15 years or so, researchers at the University of Arizona's Wildcat Research and Conservation Center have built a network of about 100 cameras across more than a dozen mountain ranges. And guess what? More than 200 detections of at least four individual jaguars have come through.

And in November 2025, their cameras turned up a brand new face, the fifth cat in all those years. officially it's logged as Jaguar number 5, though the team took to calling it Cinco. But the one thing nobody actually knew in the beginning was the thing that mattered the most, and that was, what is it sex? And that question lands right on top of the single most important thing in this whole situation. You see, every Jaguar Arizona's actually managed to document over the last 60-odd years, such as El Hefei, Macha B before him, etc., etc., have all been male. Now, obviously it wasn't always like that, with the last confirmed female in this stage,

state going all the way back to 1963, but since then, nothing but boys. And that's not just some fluke either, with the fish and wildlife service saying pretty much flat out that male jaguars roam farther than females when they go looking for new territory. And a 2016 study found the exact same thing baked into the DNA, with the genes passed down only for mothers, barely budging across the map, well then the genes from both parents were scattered all over the place. So basically, boys like to wander while the girl stay put. So, then the question again is, what is Cinco?

And the answer you've all been waiting for is that Cinco is a guy. Yeah, just another dude. And that's the thing. A lone male on a trail camera is thrilling, but it really only tells you that the hypothetical door is unlocked. Not that anyone's setting up shop per se, or at least not the ones that matter. No offense, guys. And remember how I said that a male's territory is basically built to wrap around the ranges of a couple of females? while a cat like El Hefe or Cinco could hold down perfectly good ground up here for years,

with those female-shaped spaces being ripe for the taking, but then having no one filling in said spaces. Which brings us back to square one, because a real comeback isn't just a bachelor at the watering hole. There has to be a female. And it looks like a female making the same brutal crossing, surviving it, finding a quiet canyon somewhere, then meeting up with the rare other male,

settling into den, carrying our cubs for around a hundred-ish days, giving birth or litter up to four, which are, by the way, barely two pounds apiece, and then keeping them alive at her side for the better part of two years while they learn to hunt is kind of tough. So yeah, basically the bar for repopulation is a bit higher than a nice photo of a jaguar. And right when facilitating female crossing matters the most, so our bachelors can find a wife, we've kind of gone and made it harder.

The wall which is erected south of Arizona, you know the one I'm talking about, stands about 26 to 30 feet tall, which a jaguar just probably won't climb, even if it technically could. And little gaps left for wildlife, the so-called doggy doors, are about the size of a sheet printer paper, which while great for a havelina, is pretty much useless for potentially 200-plus-pound cat. And for the ones that could still find a way around, one study worked out that the wall bumped up the energy Jaguar Burns, just getting to water on the U.S. side, from a modeled 1,343 calories to about 1,434, so an extra 4% of its day, which might not sound like much

put out here in the scorching desert of Arizona, that amount adds up, and that is just from the perspective of getting water. And guess who this falls hardest on? Exactly the cat that matters the most, a female, especially if she ever does, have cubs. And even if she could make it across, she wouldn't exactly have the place to herself. Pumas, or mountain lions, work the same northern frontier. And now you might be thinking, well, that's not really a problem seeing how jaguars are a little bit bigger. And yes, this is true that jaguars are the undisputed top dog, or rather top cat, in the tropics, with mountain lions largely keeping out of their way. But another study, focusing on this arid northern region,

found that out here the dominance pretty much evaporates, with them instead finding that animals are more likely to co-occur than not. Now, I would caution interpreting this as, oh, wow, they help each other, with it more likely being confounded by the fact that there is just so little habitable territory, that therefore it's more likely that they're found near each other than not. But regardless, no matter how neutral or negative it is, one thing is clear, which is that, unlike in the tropics, the jaguar does not appear to dominate here.

And while that doesn't shut a jaguar out, obviously, it can add another tough variable to the equation. And it certainly does not help that we're only adding more variables on top of that. You see, for the most part, the Fish and Wildlife Service treats the American chunk of Jaguar range as peripheral, more of a fringe than anything central to whether the species pulls through. And in 2020, it actually removed protected critical habitat for the jaguar, which now leaves it with only about 1,000 square miles. So the real question is not to whether jaguars can show up in America, because the answer is yes there, and they have over and over again, stubbornly, may I add, against pretty much all odds. No, the real question is whether they can make a true home here, and if we're fine leaving the borderlands as a place jaguars only ever pass through,

rather than a place which will welcome back these amazing cats like long-lost children, and hopefully eventually lead to grandchildren. So the next time you hear about a jaguar crossing the U.S. border, and think to yourself, hmm, that's strange, they shouldn't be here. Just remember, they in fact should. And the question of, if they can stay, turns out to be in large part up to us. Thanks for watching, and until next time.

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