The Names of the Wild Cats

"So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name," Gen. 2:19.

That is, from the beginning of our created existence we have been "name-givers." We don't know whether the birds of the air or fish of the sea have names for us, but we sure have names for them.

The universally accepted system for naming living things is the Linnaean classification system. First articulated in C. Linnaeaus in his Systema naturae (1758), the system at first consisted of five categories of names of living things: kingdom, class, order, genus and species. That system has been considerably expanded and revised in the ensuing 250 years, but what hasn't changed is our penchant for giving names to things.

I propose in this and the next essay to work through the list of 36 (or 37) species of "wild cats" to show what some of the Latin names mean and, at times, to show how these names were given to the cats. I believe that if you know why the names were given you not only can remember them better but you put yourselves in the long tradition of students who want to understand the natural world more completely.

A Word on the Wild Cats

This list of the 36 species of wild cats is a standard one; another list, which has 37 species, is identical to the first one except that it also includes the Iriomote Cat (Prionailurus iriomotensis), one of the rarest species of cat in the world (with an estimated population of fewer than 100, all of which live on the Japanese island of Iriomote). Seven of these 36 species are featured in S.1033, the bill introduced in the Senate in 2007 to try to secure $5,000,000 to preserve and protect "great cats" and "rare canids" around the world. Thinking about that piece of legislation made me want to check out what the rest of the felines and canids were. Some of the "common names" of the most family "great cats" are "lion, panther, jaguar, cheetah," while some less well-known wild felines are the "rusty-spotted cat, the Iberian lynx, the kodkod, the serval, the ocelot, the oncilla and the margay." Let's look at some of the Linnaean nomenclature to understand our "Adamic" task of naming things.

A Trip to Mongolia and the Pallas Cat or Manul

One of the smaller wild cats which I knew nothing about a few weeks ago is the "Pallas' cat" or "manul." Its Linnaean name is Otocolobus manul. Here is a picture. And here is another. This sentence gives a good description: "About the size of a large domestic cat, the manul is covered with long coarse fur, sandy to grey in base color with white tips on the guard hairs which gives an overall 'frosted' appearance." There is even such a thing as the "Pallas Cat Project in Mongolia," which works on a shoestring to try to preserve these cats and understand their behavior.

But why the name(s)? First, let's begin with the "modern" terms. The "Pallas" in the title refers to Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811), a German naturalist, best known for his studies of the fauna of the Russian Empire. Indeed, the OED has references to Pallas' warbler as well as Pallas' cat. Pallas published a 1776 book Reise durch verschiedene Provinzen des Russischen Reichs III, in which he identified what he called the "Tataris et Mongolis Manul." The word manul probably comes form a Turkic language word meaning "wild cat." So, the wild cat of Mongolia, called the "Manul," was first attested in an English-language publication in 1781. It wasn't until 1883, however, that it was called "Pallas's Thibetan cat." Today there are more attestations for the usage manul than Pallas' cat.

A collaborative project between North American scientists and Mongolian wildlife biologists will investigate activity patterns, intraspecies relations, prey selection and current distribution of the manul. Some Pallas' cats are in North American zoos, but they exhibit extreme neonatal mortality due to Toxoplasmosis.

But I am fascinated also by the Latin name, Otocolobus manul. What would that mean? Of course the "manul" part of it is now clear, but "Otocolobus"? Oto is a Latin prefix having to do with "ears" and colobus is taken from the Greek word kolobus, which means "docked" or "mutiliated" or "shortened." The colobus monkey, for example, is an African monkey distinguished by their short thumbs. Thus, the word suggests some kind of mutilated, docked or shortened ear. What does the OED say? In describing the Pallas cat it says it is "native to deserts and rocky regions of central Asia from the Caspian sea to Tibet, with a predominantly silvery grey to light brownish coat, long on the underside, and distinctive low-set ears." Look at the pictures again. Now do you see the smaller and "shortened" ears? There is your name....

Conclusion--the Marbled Cat and Snow Leopard

The Marbled Cat is the Pardofelis marmorata; the Clouded Leopard is the Neofelis nebulosa. I consider them together here because the former is often considered to be sort of a smaller version of the latter. A wonderful picture of the Pardofelis marmorata, along with some other rare wild felids, is here. To take apart its name...the "marmorata" part is easy enough--it just means "marbled" in Latin. Pardofelis is a combination Latin word, consisting of "panther" or "pard" and "cat." I didn't know that pard was a word in our language; indeed, it is. It means "a panther, a leopard; also an animal resembling these." Shakespeare used the term in As You Like It, "Then, a Soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the Pard..." So, the Latin name means almost the same as the English--a marbled panther cat.

The Clouded Leopard is the Neofelis nebulosa. Neofelis means "new cat." It is one of those midsize cats that can neither roar like the "true" great cats (lions, tigers) nor purr like the small cats. Looks like the worst of both worlds. Only the Clouded Leopard and the Margay (see below) can climb down trees head-first. It can even hang upside down by its hind legs, a trick that you probably shouldn't try at home. Here is a picture of this beauty. As you see, its body looks "cloudy," which is the translation of nebulosa. The elliptical sections on its fur remind you of clouds thay separated from each other by distinctive borders.

I need one more essay on these cats.

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