Mountain Lion, Panther, Cougar, Puma: One Species, 40+ Names
One animal. One species. Guinness World Records recognises Puma concolor as the mammal with the greatest number of common names of any species - over 40 in English alone. Here is why it is also called panther and why there are no black ones in the wild.
The Punchline First
Mountain lion, cougar, puma, panther, catamount, painter, ghost cat, mountain screamer, red tiger, deer cat - every one of these names refers to the same animal: Puma concolor, a single species found from the Yukon to Patagonia. Guinness World Records cites the cougar as the mammal with the most recognised common names in the English language: over 40. If you include indigenous language names across North and South America, the figure exceeds 80.
This matters for the jaguar vs panther question because a significant proportion of "panther" references in American English - particularly in Florida, the Southeast, and Appalachia - refer to this animal, not to a jaguar or leopard. The Florida panther is the most formally recognised example, but the cougar's "panther" identity extends well beyond state boundaries.
The Regional Vocabulary Map
The oldest American English name. 'Painter' is a corruption of 'panther' common in 18th-19th century Appalachian English. Still heard in rural Virginia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas.
The dominant name in current mainstream American English for the western population. First used in print by European explorers in the 1700s.
Derives from the Portuguese 'susuarana', from the Tupi 'susua'rana' (false deer), which was corrupted through Spanish 'cuguar' to English. Common in Canadian wildlife reporting.
From Quechua 'puma'. The preferred common name in most South American countries. Gaining traction as the global preferred name because it is unambiguous and has no regional English baggage.
Contraction of 'cat of the mountain.' Common in colonial New England and still heard in Vermont and the Adirondack region of New York, though the eastern cougar was officially declared extinct by USFWS in 2018.
Regional and folkloric terms reflecting the animal's eerie screaming call (which resembles a woman screaming) and its near-invisible presence in suitable habitat.
Why So Many Names: The Geography of a Continent-Spanning Cat
Puma concolor has the largest latitudinal range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from the Yukon Territory in Canada to the tip of South America in Patagonia - roughly 110 degrees of latitude. For comparison, the jaguar spans perhaps 60 degrees. This extraordinary range means that European colonists encountering the cougar in dozens of distinct cultural and linguistic contexts over 400 years each coined or adapted their own names, frequently borrowing from local Indigenous languages or from familiar European animals.
"Puma" itself is Quechua, the language of the Inca empire and its successors. Spanish colonists adopted it in South America. "Cougar" is a French and Portuguese adaptation of a Tupi word. "Catamount" is a straightforward English portmanteau. "Painter" is a slurred phonetic corruption of "panther" that evolved in Appalachian dialect by the 18th century. Each name reflects a distinct moment of cultural contact between European settlers and a large, dangerous, fascinating wild cat that had no equivalent in European fauna.
Indigenous American peoples have many more names: Culver et al. (2000) documented over 80 indigenous-language names for Puma concolor across the Americas. The range of names in itself tells you something about how long, and how widely, this animal has shared a continent with humans.
No, There Are No Wild Black Cougars
This is one of the most persistent myths in American wildlife lore. Despite thousands of eyewitness reports of "black panthers" across North America - particularly in the Southeast - no confirmed melanistic cougar has ever been documented in the wild in the entire scientific literature. Not one. Ever.
Young and Goldman (1946, The Puma: Mysterious American Cat) reviewed every historical report of melanistic cougars available at the time and found none that held up to scrutiny. Anderson (1983) reviewed the question again for a broader carnivore-melanism study. Geneticists studying cougar populations have found no evidence of the ASIP or MC1R variants that produce melanism in other felid species. Unlike jaguars and leopards, cougars appear to have no established genetic pathway to full melanism.
What are people actually seeing when they report a black panther in the US? The most evidence-supported explanations:
- 1A large feral domestic cat (Maine Coon crosses can reach 9 kg; black is one of the most common domestic cat colours)
- 2A jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi) - a small South American wild cat with an established Texas population, with dark-phase individuals
- 3A dark-phase cougar (not melanistic; some individuals are significantly darker tawny than average, especially in certain lighting)
- 4An escaped or released exotic pet (black leopards and black jaguars are kept illegally in some US states)
- 5Misidentification of species, distance, or context - a black domestic cat photographed at 50m at dusk can look like a panther in a photograph
The consistent failure to produce physical evidence (tracks, scat, body, unambiguous high-resolution photograph) from thousands of American "black panther" reports over 150 years is the strongest argument against their existence as wild cougars. The absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence - but in this case, with modern wildlife cameras proliferating across the continent, it is strongly indicative.
Cougar vs Jaguar: The Two Large Cats of the Americas
Both jaguars and cougars live in the Americas - and in Central and South America, their ranges overlap substantially. Yet they are profoundly different animals. The jaguar (Panthera onca) is in the family Pantherinae (the "roaring cats"); the cougar (Puma concolor) is in Felinae (the "small cats" subfamily), despite being larger than many animals commonly called big cats. The cougar cannot roar - it produces screams, growls, and purrs. The jaguar roars (a deep, low cough-grunt). This vocal difference is the single most diagnostic distinction between a Panthera and a Puma.
Where their ranges overlap, jaguars and cougars can occupy overlapping territories. Jaguars tend to dominate prime riparian habitat; cougars take more upland terrain. Cougar kill-cache sites in South America sometimes show evidence of jaguar kleptoparasitism - jaguars stealing cougar kills when the opportunity arises. Despite this, direct conflict is rare and neither species regularly predates the other.
SPECIES FACTS
By the Digital Signet editorial team. Sources: Culver et al. 2000 (J Heredity), Young and Goldman 1946, IUCN Red List 2022 (Puma concolor). Full citations at /sources.