With a body length of up to 1.85 m (6 ft 1 in) and a weight of up to 158 kg (348 lb), it is the biggest cat species in the Americas and the third largest in the world.

The modern jaguar's ancestors probably entered the Americas from Eurasia during the Early Pleistocene via the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait.

Today, the jaguar's range extends from the Southwestern United States across Mexico and much of Central America, the Amazon rainforest and south to Paraguay and northern Argentina.

[6][7] Because that word also applies to other animals, indigenous peoples in Guyana call it jaguareté, with the added sufix eté, meaning "true beast".

[5] By 2005, nine subspecies were considered to be valid taxa:[3] Reginald Innes Pocock placed the jaguar in the genus Panthera and observed that it shares several morphological features with the leopard (P. pardus).

However, the 2024 study suggested that the validity of subspecific assignments on both P. o. augusta and P. o. mesembrina remains unresolved, since both fossil and living jaguars show a considerable variation in morphometry.

[5] The jaguar's coat ranges from pale yellow to tan or reddish-yellow, with a whitish underside and covered in black spots.

The spots on the head and neck are generally solid, as are those on the tail where they may merge to form bands near the end and create a black tip.

The rosettes on a jaguar's coat are larger, darker, fewer in number and have thicker lines, with a small spot in the middle.

[49] In 2004, a camera trap in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains photographed the first documented black jaguar in Northern Mexico.

[50] Black jaguars were also photographed in Costa Rica's Alberto Manuel Brenes Biological Reserve, in the mountains of the Cordillera de Talamanca, in Barbilla National Park and in eastern Panama.

[54] Its present range extends from Mexico through Central America to South America comprising Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, particularly on the Osa Peninsula, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

The only record of an active jaguar den with breeding adults and kittens in the United States was in the Tehachapi Mountains of California prior to 1860.

The jaguar has also been termed a keystone species, as it is assumed that it controls the population levels of prey such as herbivorous and seed-eating mammals and thus maintains the structural integrity of forest systems.

[80] It kills capybara by piercing its canine teeth through the temporal bones of its skull, breaking its zygomatic arch and mandible and penetrating its brain, often through the ears.

[81] It has been hypothesized to be an adaptation to cracking open turtle shells; armored reptiles may have formed an abundant prey base for the jaguar following the late Pleistocene extinctions.

The jaguar attacks from cover and usually from a target's blind spot with a quick pounce; the species' ambushing abilities are considered nearly peerless in the animal kingdom by both indigenous people and field researchers and are probably a product of its role as an apex predator in several different environments.

[84] In some areas, males may form paired coalitions which together mark, defend and invade territories, find and mate with the same females and search for and share prey.

[86] In one wetland population with degraded territorial boundaries and more social proximity, adults of the same sex are more tolerant of each other and engage in more friendly and co-operative interactions.

Habitat loss was most rapid in drier regions such as the Argentine pampas, the arid grasslands of Mexico and the southwestern United States.

[112] In Venezuela, the jaguar was extirpated in about 26% of its range in the country since 1940, mostly in dry savannas and unproductive scrubland in the northeastern region of Anzoátegui.

[113] In Ecuador, the jaguar is threatened by reduced prey availability in areas where the expansion of the road network facilitated access of human hunters to forests.

[114] In the Alto Paraná Atlantic forests, at least 117 jaguars were killed in Iguaçu National Park and the adjacent Misiones Province between 1995 and 2008.

Hunting jaguars is prohibited in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, French Guiana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, the United States, and Venezuela.

These corridors represent areas with the shortest distance between jaguar breeding populations, require the least possible energy input of dispersing individuals and pose a low mortality risk.

[128] Cooperation with local landowners and municipal, state, or federal agencies is essential to maintain connected populations and prevent fragmentation in both JCUs and corridors.

[130] In August 2012, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service set aside 3,392.20 km2 (838,232 acres) in Arizona and New Mexico for the protection of the jaguar.

[145][146] Sculptures with "Olmec were-jaguar" motifs were found on the Yucatán Peninsula in Veracruz and Tabasco; they show stylized jaguars with half-human faces.

[147] In the later Maya civilization, the jaguar was known as balam or bolom' in many of the Mayan languages, and was used to symbolize warriors and the elite class for being brave, fierce and strong.

[61] Rock drawings made by the Hopi, Anasazi and Pueblo all over the desert and chaparral regions of the American Southwest show an explicitly spotted cat, presumably a jaguar, as it is drawn much larger than an ocelot.