Biologists Finally Found Out What Texas Black Panthers Actually Are

Every county in Texas seems to have a black panther. A black mountain lion crossing the road outside town. A long, dark cat on the trail camera at 3 a.m. A rumor that the state knows and won't say. The evidence tells a different story. No black mountain lion has ever been confirmed anywhere, in the wild or in captivity. Black jaguars almost never occur in the dry, open country Texas jaguars lived in. But Texas really did have a dark, long-tailed native wild cat: the jaguarundi, which turns out to be the mountain lion's closest living relative and carries its own darkening gene. Then it vanished. Eighteen years and more than 350,000 camera-trap nights in South Texas found zero, while cameras just across the border in Mexico photographed 126. In this episode: how wild cats turn black (and why the mountain lion apparently can't), the last jaguar shot near Kingsville in 1948, the 1986 Brownsville road kill, why trail-cam cats look darker than they are, the real black bobcats of Florida and the new Maine report, the tawny mountain lion struck in Longview at 3 a.m., Texas's first-ever mountain lion rules, and why your county may decide what's really out there. 📁 FREE Frontier Evidence File for this episode: the six wild cats of Texas, the melanism genetics table, the South Texas vs. Tamaulipas camera numbers, a myth-vs-evidence table, a trail-camera ID checklist, and every study cited. Download it here: drive.google.com/file/d/1hrk2WRAvJJJFAk_FpXc6_qbIjdNuQm5f/view?usp=sharing TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 2:14 "Panther": the old name for the mountain lion 3:44 How wild cats turn black 5:25 The black jaguar theory 6:47 Escaped exotics and house cats 9:20 The jaguarundi 12:36 18 years of cameras, zero jaguarundis 15:33 Why some cats go dark 17:10 Black bobcats 18:46 The Longview mountain lion and Texas's new lion rules 22:38 So what is the Texas black panther? Key sources: Eizirik et al. (2003), Current Biology: the genetic origins of black coats in wild cats da Silva et al. (2016), Journal of Zoology: coat-color mapping of the jaguarundi Graipel et al. (2019), PLOS ONE: why black coats evolve in cats Lombardi et al. (2022), Ecology and Evolution: jaguarundi status in Texas and northeastern Mexico Texas Parks and Wildlife Department; The Mammals of Texas (Texas Tech online edition) Which county are you watching from? Tell me in the comments. #BlackPanther #Texas #Jaguarundi #FrontierEvidence #WildlifeScience #MountainLion #TexasWildlife