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Its classification as a species was mostly disputed. [17] There has been considerable confusion in the nomenclature of the cheetah and leopard ( Panthera pardus ) as authors often confused the two; some considered "hunting leopards" an independent species, or equal to the leopard.
Acinonyx is a genus within the Felidae family. [1] The only living species of the genus, the cheetah (A. jubatus), lives in open grasslands of Africa and Asia. [2] Several fossil remains of cheetah-like cats were excavated that date to the late Pliocene and Middle Pleistocene. [3] These cats occurred in Africa, parts of Europe and Asia about ...
Miracinonyx (colloquially known as the "American cheetah") is an extinct genus of felids belonging to the subfamily Felinae that was endemic to North America from the Pleistocene epoch (about 2.5 million to 16,000 years ago) and morphologically similar to the modern cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), although its apparent similar ecological niches have been considered questionable due to anatomical ...
The basic ranks are species and genus. When an organism is given a species name it is assigned to a genus, and the genus name is part of the species name. The species name is also called a binomial, that is, a two-term name. For example, the zoological name for the human species is Homo sapiens. This is usually italicized in print or underlined ...
The king cheetah was considered a different species in 1927 by naturalist Reginald Innes Pocock. It was found to be a mutation caused by a recessive gene. [19] The king cheetah is a rare variant of the Southern cheetah, first discovered in southern Rhodesia in 1925. A king cheetah was first found in South Africa in 1940 and in Botswana in 1942.
An "authority" may be placed after a scientific name. [94] The authority is the name of the scientist or scientists who first validly published the name. [94] For example, in 1758, Linnaeus gave the Asian elephant the scientific name Elephas maximus, so the name is sometimes written as "Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758". [95]
The earliest African cheetah fossils from the early Pleistocene have been found in the lower beds of the Olduvai Gorge site in northern Tanzania. [7]Not much was known about the East African cheetah's evolutionary story, although at first, the East and Southern African cheetahs were thought to be identical as the genetic distance between the two subspecies is low. [13]
Restoration. Like the modern cheetah, Acinonyx pardinensis is generally thought to have been adapted to running down prey. It probably took larger prey than living cheetahs, with estimated prey masses of 50–100 kilograms (110–220 lb), [2] though the idea that its ecology was similar to a modern cheetah has been contested by some authors, who suggest an ecology more similar to pantherine ...