Black panther

[2][3] In 1809, Georges Cuvier described a black leopard kept in the Ménagerie du Jardin des plantes that had been brought from Java.

[6] By 1929, the Natural History Museum, London had skins of black leopards collected in South Africa, Nepal, Assam and Kanara in India.

[10] In India's Western Ghats, black leopards were sighted and photographed in 2010 and 2012 in the Kas Plateau Reserved Forest, and in Bhadra Wildlife Sanctuary in 2012.

[13] At least one black leopard was photographed in mixed deciduous forest in Thailand's Kaeng Krachan National Park during a one-year-long camera trapping survey from 2003 to 2004.

[15] Most leopards recorded at 16 sites south of the Kra Isthmus between 1996 and 2009 were black, indicating a near-fixation of melanism in Peninsular Malaysia.

Based on records from camera traps, melanistic leopards occur foremost in tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests.

[20] It is thought that melanism confers a selective advantage under certain conditions since it is more common in regions of dense forest, where light levels are lower.

Any spots on the flanks and limbs that have not merged into the mass of swirls and stripes are unusually small and discrete, rather than forming rosettes.

[27] In 1801, Félix de Azara described a black jaguar observed by local people near the Paraná River in Paraguay.

[29] In 2009, a black jaguar was photographed by a camera trap for the first time in Costa Rica's Alberto Manuel Brenes Biological Reserve.

[32] In eastern Panama, black jaguars were repeatedly photographed in the Mamoní River Valley between 2016 and 2018, mostly in primary forest.

[33] Five black jaguars have been monitored in the Várzea forest of Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Brazilian State of Amazonas between 2003 and 2018.

The Bronx Park animal appears darker and the spots are not visible, although the poor light in the quarantine cage may have been the reason.

Unconfirmed sightings known as the "North American black panther" are currently attributed to errors in species identification by non-experts, and by the mimetic exaggeration of size.