Canis lupus hominis

This is a “mystery cat” that needs more examination.

Source.

This isn’t like ol’ bigfoot.

This is something that could actually be in Florida, though I would bet that any of these cats would be derived from an introduced population.

Although we have records of jaguarundis in Florida from the Pleistocene, it would seem unlikely that this is a relict population of native ones.

My little quibble with this clip is that it says that these Florida jaguarundis might be the only ones in North America.

North America is everything from Panama northward, so there are jaguarundis in North America.  And there are records of them in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

For whatever reason, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission seems to think that it is impossible for jaguarundis to exist in the state.

However, this is the state that has so many exotic species thriving in its borders that it would seem more likely that a native North American cat  would be able to survive there than something like a Burmese python.

But it’s well-known that South Florida does have a population of pythons living in its borders.

And keep in mind, that there are quite a few people in the US who own exotic cats.

In 2011, a serval was mistaken for an ocelot in Arizona. Servals are African cats that are fairly common in the pet trade in the United States. They are also commonly kept for  hybridization purposes.  The Savannah cat is a domestic cat breed that has some amount of serval blood. In order to keep the serval phenotype in the bloodlines, breeders still have to breed back to the wild species every so often.

A serval surviving in the Sonora Desert sounds a bit far-fetched, but as of 2011, there is at least one living there.

So I don’t know why a jagurundi in Florida is just so unlikely.

See related post

• Mini-cougar