Ancient Jaguars

[KRA123]

Here is a cast of a jaguar pugmark found in Craighead Caverns, Eastern Tennessee. A rule is to the right for scale. The picture is from this pdf.

*This image is copyright of its original author

 
Large jaguar bones were found in the caverns in 1939, and in 1940 George Simpson, the author of the linked paper, visited the caverns and collected more bones. He also descried several footprints. The bones may belong to more than one individual, as, I suppose, may the footprints. When discussing the origin of the tracks, and the assignment of their provenance to jaguars, the author writes the following:
"Large recent male pumas of the F. concolor oregonensis or hippolestes group may leave tracks as much as 90 mm. across the three middle toe pads, but probably never much exceed that size. Since this dimension is about 120 mm. in the cave prints, these certainly could not have been made by any recent puma. They could have been made by a jaguar of about the maximum size for males of the largest South American races, and this is about the size of the bones found in Craighead Caverns. "

 Web publications, including Simpson's paper, variously describe the first recovered bones from Craighead Caverns as belonging to  a   "very large", "giant" or "great"  jaguar, but this passage suggests that the animal in question was about the size of larger modern Pantanal specimens, which, honestly, seems like what really should be expected for most P. o .augusta and P .o. mesembrina, taking the morphometric studies done by various authors into consideration. The size descriptors used by Simpson are evidently in comparison to the smaller modern jaguars of North America, not to the most imposing examples of the species from South America. Reply