Pumapard, leopard-puma hybrids?

Pumapard, 1904 You are probably aware of Pantherahybrids from Napoleon Dynamite. Specifically, Ligers, the largest of all the big cats. But the hybridization of the Panthera species shouldn't be so shocking. They have diversified only within the last 2 to 4 million years. The lone New World variant (or at least surviving New World variant, recall the extinct American lion), the jaguar, arrived a few million years ago across Beringia. This is not too surprising, as many iconic "American" animals, such as the American bison, made the same journey (Camels went the other direction). But there were already "big cats" in the New World. The puma or cougar. These are notPanthera, and I only recently realized that jaguars were not closely related to this species. Rather, the puma is the ironically largest of the "small cats". Which brings me to the subject of this post, the enigmatic pumapard. This is ...