Clouded leopard
Neofelis nebulosa
— Where the name comes from
Neofelis is “new cat”, from the Greek néos and the Latin felis: when Gray created the genus in 1867 he recognised that it fitted none of the existing ones. Nebulosa describes the coat, where the marks are not rosettes but large blotches with blurred edges, like clouds seen from below. In Chinese it is 雲豹, “cloud leopard”, and in Malaysia harimau dahan, “branch tiger”.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Tropical and subtropical rainforest, montane forest up to 3,000 m
- Range
- From the eastern Himalaya to mainland South-East Asia and southern China
- Size
- 68–108 cm of body plus 60–90 cm of tail, 11–23 kg
- Diet
- Carnivore — monkeys, small deer, porcupines, birds
- Lifespan
- About 11 years, up to 17 in captivity
— Characteristics
- 01
It has the longest canines relative to skull size of any living cat.
- 02
The tail is as long as the body and works as a balance among the branches.
- 03
Its ankles rotate backwards: it comes down trunks head first, like a squirrel.
— What sets it apart
Its canines are in the proportions of a sabre-toothed cat, and it has often been called “the missing link” with the smilodons — a suggestive comparison and a wrong one, since there is no such kinship. The real fact is different and more interesting: it opens its mouth to nearly ninety degrees, more than any other cat. A jaw joint that mobile is needed to make such long teeth work, and it appeared here independently, not by inheritance.
