The Pleistocene Jaguar--pantera Onca Augusta

[MarkGelbart]

Here's the third excerpt of four from my manuscript--Georgia Before People: Land of the Saber-tooths, mastodons, vampire bats, and other strange creatures.

The Pleistocene Jaguar--(Pantera onca augusta)

Along with dire wolves, this big spotted cat was probably the most common large carnivore (not including bears which though classified as carnivores are omnivorous) to live in Pleistocene Georgia. In Florida where the fossil record is much more complete than that of Georgia, they were among the most abundant large carnivorous mammals, and fossil specimens have been recovered from Ladds Quarry and Kingston Saltpeter Cave in Bartow County, Georgia. Large carnivore fossils are otherwise rare in the state, owing to the low odds of an animal becoming fossilized, so the presence of jaguar specimens here is significant and indicates forested conditions prevailed for the most part here and in Florida because jaguars are a creature of the woods.

Pleistocene jaguars were as big as modern day tigers. An Oregon newspaper reported the skeleton of a thirty-thousand year old jaguar found in a cave there was from an animal estimated to weigh five-hundred pounds (20). However, Dr. Kevin Seymour of the Royal Ontario Museum took a sabbatical specifically to study the specimen and he told me he doesn't know where the journalist came up with that figure because he's never taken the time to estimate weight.

Dr. Seymour believes jaguars co-existed with lions and cougars because they occupied a different niche, though there was likely some overlap and competition. Jaguars preferred the swampy creek and river bottoms, lions were better adapted to open grasslands, and cougars liked the higher and drier elevated woods.

In one memorable episode of the cartoon, Bugs Bunny, the wise-cracking rabbit encountered the Tasmanian Devil. Bugs studied a book about the fictional version of this creature and read aloud a long list of animals it ate. Of course, real Tasmanian Devils don't eat everything in the animal kingdom, but the list of animals jaguars ate would include almost ever Pleistocene species around--deer, horse, tapir, peccary, llama, armadillo, and even turtle. Jaguars have the most powerful bite of any cat and are able to crush turtle shell, unlike the bite of a saber-tooth which had to close its jaws in a delicate fashion in order not to damage its fangs. As I mentioned earlier, at Ladds long bones of giant tortoises and armadilloes were found with jaguar gnaw marks on them. Moreover, some individual Siberian tigers learn how to hunt and kill brown bears. It's probable some large jaguars hunted bears as well (21).

Late Pleistocene jaguars were built to ambush their prey and had short muscular legs, but early in the Pleistocene, before they had to compete with lions, they had longer legs built for running down prey in the open. They may have evolved into ambush-type predators in response to lion colonization of North America when they were no longer the best adapted animal for hunting in the open (22).

The range of the jaguar has diminished since the end of the Pleistocene and corresponds with the range of their favorite prey--the peccary. The extinction of the long-nosed peccary and flat-headed peccary is the primary cause of the decline of their geographic range, but men also coveted their spotted coat, and I think direct hunting had more of an impact on jaguar populations than many scientists think. Because of man, jaguars can only survive in remote areas--thick jungles, deserts, and uninhabited pampas. During Colonial times after Indian populations crashed, jaguars were re-extending their range as far east as the Red River in Oklahoma, but then Europeans came and beat them back once more, so now they're rare north of the Rio Grande.

Sources from my end notes.

(20) Hill, Richard

"Ice Age Jaguar Among Fossil Finds"

The Oregonian 12-13-2006

(21) The source for jaguar gnaw marks found on tortoise and armadillo bones is:

Holman, Alan

"The Herpetofauna of Ladds Quarry"

National Geographic Research 1 (3) pp. 423-436 1985

The source for individual Siberian tigers hunting brown bears is:

Matthiessen, Peter

Tigers in the Snow

North Point Press 2000

(22) Turner, Allen

The Big Cats and their Fossil Relatives

Columbia University Press 1997

Coming in a couple weeks--my fourth and final excerpt--Kingston Saltpeter Cave