Cougar, puma, mountain lion, panther, catamount, painter. That’s six names for the same animal, and there are at least 40 more. Puma concolor has the largest range of any wild land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, and every culture that encountered it named it something different. Here’s the real story behind the names, the genetics that collapsed 32 supposed subspecies into six, and what this cat actually does across two continents.
