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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]
The Saharan cheetah is thought to be regionally extinct in Morocco, Western Sahara, Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. [2] In Mali, cheetahs were sighted in Adrar des Ifoghas and in the Kidal Region in the 1990s. [7] In 2010, a cheetah was photographed in Niger's Termit Massif by a camera trap. [8]
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]
The cheetah is highly threatened by the illegal pet trade from Somaliland. Cheetah cubs are sold on the black market for over $10,000 but rescuing a single cub costs more than three times that much. The majority of captive cheetah cubs is thought to die before they are exported from Africa. [15] [16]
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An illustration of a cheetah cub (Acinonyx jubatus guttata) by Joseph Wolf in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 1867The Southern African cheetah was first described by German naturalist Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber in his book Die Säugethiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur mit Beschreibungen (The Mammals illustrated as in Nature with Descriptions), published in 1775.
The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is a large cat and the fastest land animal. It has a tawny to creamy white or pale buff fur that is marked with evenly spaced, solid black spots. The head is small and rounded, with a short snout and black tear-like facial streaks. It reaches 67–94 cm (26–37 in) at the shoulder, and the head-and-body length is ...
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 ...