Shortest tail for a big cat

The big cat species with the shortest tail is the jaguar Panthera onca. Native to South America (most especially the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil), Central America, Mexico and spasmodically reported from the southern USA, it is proportionately a very bulky, sturdy cat – with the largest males as big as an average-sized tigress – and yet its tail only measures 45–75 cm.

In 1994, African adventurer and author Peter Hathaway Capstick alluded to the presence somewhere in New York of two black jaguar skins that possessed abnormally short tails, but so far the precise location of these skins has not been made public, nor have they been scientifically examined.