It inhabits North, Central and South America, making it the most widely distributed wild, terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the most widespread in the world.

Its range spans the Yukon, British Columbia and Alberta provinces of Canada, the Rocky Mountains and areas in the western United States.

Its activity pattern varies from diurnality and cathemerality to crepuscularity and nocturnality between protected and non-protected areas, and is apparently correlated with the presence of other predators, prey species, livestock and humans.

Fatal attacks on humans are rare but increased in North America as more people entered cougar habitat and built farms.

Intensive hunting following European colonization of the Americas and ongoing human development into cougar habitat has caused populations to decline in most parts of its historical range.

Furthermore, melanistic color variants of the leopard and jaguar are commonly called black panthers, although they are not in the same sub-family as cougars found in the Americas.

Genetic analysis of cougar mitochondrial DNA indicates that many of these are too similar to be recognized as distinct at a molecular level but that only six phylogeographic groups exist.

In the latest genomic study of the Felidae, the common ancestor of today's Leopardus, Lynx, Puma, Prionailurus, and Felis lineages migrated across the Bering land bridge into the Americas 8.0 to 8.5 million years ago.

[26] A high level of genetic similarity has been found among North American cougar populations, suggesting they are all fairly recent descendants of a small ancestral group.

Culver et al. propose the original North American cougar population was extirpated during the Pleistocene extinctions some 10,000 years ago, when other large mammals, such as Smilodon, also disappeared.

[27] The oldest fossil record of a cougar (Puma concolor) in South America (Argentina) is a partial skull from the late Calabrian (Ensenadan) age.

[42][43] The cougar has large paws and proportionally the largest hind legs in the Felidae,[35] allowing for great leaping and powerful short sprints.

[44] The cougar has the most extensive range of any wild land animal in the Americas, spanning 110 degrees of latitude from the Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes in Chile.

[48] In El Salvador, it was recorded in the lower montane forest in Montecristo National Park and in a river basin in the Morazán Department above 700 m (2,300 ft) in 2019.

[60] Other listed prey species of the cougar include mice, porcupines, American beavers, raccoons, hares, guanacoes, peccaries, vicuñas, rheas and wild turkeys.

It stalks through brush and trees, across ledges, or other covered spots, before delivering a powerful leap onto the back of its prey and a suffocating neck bite.

One study found that grizzlies and American black bears visited 24% of cougar kills in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, usurping 10% of carcasses.

[68] Conversely, one-to-one confrontations tend to be dominated by the cat, and there are various documented accounts where wolves have been ambushed and killed,[69][70][71][72] including adult male specimens.

[73] Wolves more broadly affect cougar population dynamics and distribution by dominating territory and prey opportunities, and disrupting the feline's behavior.

[77] The jaguar tends to take the larger prey where ranges overlap, reducing both the cougar's potential size and the likelihood of direct competition between the two cats.

[93] One female adjacent to the San Andres Mountains was found with a big range of 215 km2 (83 sq mi), necessitated by poor prey abundance.

[1] Hunting it is prohibited in California, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, French Guiana, Suriname, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and most of Argentina.

[110] In a 10-year study in New Mexico of wild cougars who were not habituated to humans, the animals did not exhibit threatening behavior to researchers who approached closely (median distance=18.5 m; 61 feet) except in 6% of cases; 14⁄16 of those were females with cubs.

[124] The nineteenth-century naturalists Félix de Azara[125] and William Henry Hudson[126] thought that attacks on people, even children or sleeping adults, did not happen.

In this instance, however, Moreno had been wearing a guanaco-hide poncho round his neck and head as protection against the cold;[129] in Patagonia the guanaco is the puma's chief prey animal.

[131] On March 13, 2012, Erica Cruz, a 23-year-old shepherdess was found dead in a mountainous area near Rosario de Lerma, Salta Province, in northwestern Argentina.

[133] In 2019 in Córdoba Province, Argentina an elderly man was badly injured by a cougar after he attempted to defend his dog from it, while in neighboring Chile a 28-year-old woman was attacked and killed in Corral, in Los Ríos Region, on October 20, 2020.

The effect had a dose-response relationship with very heavy (100% removal of adult cougars) remedial hunting, leading to a 150–340% increase in livestock and human conflicts.

[140] This effect is attributed to the removal of older cougars that have learned to avoid people and their replacement by younger males that react differently to humans.

[145] In North America, mythological descriptions of the cougar have appeared in the stories of the Hocąk language ("Ho-Chunk" or "Winnebago") of Wisconsin and Illinois[146] and the Cheyenne, among others.