Archive for the 'Uncia' category

This Google map was created by the Snow Leopard Trust to locate and identify all the zoos in the world that host snow leopards.

Christina Langman is a painter that does a lot of things around big cats and could well be described as a feline artist. You would think that this leads me to invite you to visit her gallery. Yes, I do. But not only that.

You should check her blog: Big Cat Art Blog. She describes her work and the way a painting comes to life brush after brush.

You should also visit other parts of her web life with such interesting things as her Colored Pencil Tutorial where you will find the detailled step-by-step instructions to go from blank paper to something like the following picture (and it’s much more complex than you’d think at first):

Snow Leopard's Eye

A different way to look at big cats.

This superb animal has a great hpto group on Flickr. Here, there are beautiful images coming from either animals kept in world’s zoos, or photos taken by the Snow Leopard Trust which is currently working to protect the snow leopards (Uncia uncia) in the wild (in Central Asia, Mongolia).

Snow Leopard in the wild, India (Copyright 2008 Snow Leopard Trust - All rights reserved)

The big cats that we know today are but an image of the species appeared then disappeared during the last 60 million years. Of course, I think of the famous saber-toothed tiger of our youngest years, but it is not alone.

“The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives” of Alan Turner, illustrated by Mauricio Anton, is one of the enthralling books you sometimes find on a shelf. It simply browses through these dead speacies of big cats. I would have liked to find them in a photo safari, for sure:

• Simodon fatalis, whose killing smile probably allowed it to hunt bisons;
• Acinonix inexpectatus, the giant North American cheetah that some would like to re-introduce indirectly under the likes of its current African cousin;
• Homotherium serum, whose slope-backed appearance would remind of current-day hyenas.

A book that is read like a novel and is still a scientific work aimed toward a large reading public willing to know more about the big cats of prehistoric times, their evolution, their links with today’s big cats.

As a matetr of fact, the faeces from this big cat (the snow leopard) just acquired a higher status. A scietifical study just showed that a genetic analysis of the dejections of this animal allow a very precise identification (sometimes down to the individual identification) and give an excellent capacity to evaluate the bio-diversity and to count individual animals.

It becomes possible to correct previous estimates (some scats were simply from other wild cats like lynxes) or to measure precisely the genetic diversity of a population of snow leopards.

Source: NewScientist.