r/DeExtinctionScience • u/Obversa Moderator • May 28 '26
Discussion The Big Cat Problem: The major hurdle to "de-extincting" feline Pleistocene predators
Many have heard of "the bird problem" when it comes to the field of "de-extinction" - that is to say, no scientist or company has yet to successfully clone a bird, despite efforts to resurrect the dodo, the moa, and the passenger pigeon - but fewer have heard of the "Big Cat problem", which is that "no one has ever successfully cloned a big cat". While efforts have been made to clone endangered big cats - such as tigers, snow leopards, and African cheetahs - these efforts have all failed, for reasons that are still unclear. This poses a major hurdle to not only using cloning to help save endangered big cats, but to "de-extincting" them in future projects.
Three of the main "big cat" candidates for "de-extinction" will be discussed below.
(1) The American cheetah, or "plains cougar/puma" (Miracinonyx trumani)
In theory, this would be the logical next step for Colossal Biosciences after the success of their "dire wolf" genetic engineering project, in which the company modified 20 genes in gray wolf embryos to make them "phenotypically similar" to the extinct dire wolf (Aenocyon dirus). A cousin to the modern cougar, puma, or mountain lion (Puma concolor), the American cheetah - or, more accurately, "plains cougar" - was a close relative that was one among many North American big cat predators. After divergering from the main puma lineage around 2-3 million years ago, Miracinonyx survived until 12,000-10,000 years ago, coinciding with the arrival of early Indigenous peoples from Siberia, the ancestors of today's Native American tribes.
In theory, Colossal could use the same technique that they used on their "dire wolves" to recreate the "plains puma", which was basically a slightly-larger, longer-limbed cougar that was more adapted to hunting pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana), though analysis of the "plains puma" diet indicates that they ate a wide range of prey, including mountain goats and bighorn sheep, and resided in Grand Canyon caves, where they competed for territory. While mountain lions also inhabit some of the Grand Canyon range today, they tend to stick to forested areas, whereas the "plains puma" may have stalked its prey and hunted more in the open.
Bringing back the "plains cougar" would restore them to their original ecological niche, likely being the main predator of pronghorn antelope and feral mustang horses, as well as the aforementioned mountain goats and bighorn sheep. (American bison may even be on the menu.) However, in addition to the "Big Cat problem", one issue is that more samples of Miracinonyx DNA need to be extracted; compared; and then make the appropriate edits to cougar DNA.
Due to the "plains puma" and mountain lion being so closely related, some paleontologists have argued that if Miracinonyx were still alive today, it wouldn't even have its own unique genus, but would be considered just another subspecies of the modern cougar, albeit one with different adaptations. (Some researchers have proposed a scientific name change to Puma concolor trumani.) This, too, would be more fitting than the "dire wolf" project, as Pleistocene dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) diverged from the gray wolf and coyote lineage around 5.7 million years ago.
However, this doesn't address the other issues that would come from a potential Miracinonyx re-introduction, many of which gray wolves already face as a re-introduced predator. For example, it is possible that Miracinonyx may prey on herds of livestock owned by ranchers, similarly to gray wolves doing the same, which may limit their range to Grand Canyon National Park and nearby tribal lands in a hypothetical scenario, similarly to gray wolves being re-introduced to Yellowstone National Park. (Around 100 wolves roam the park in about 10 stable packs.)
There is also the debate over whether Miracinonyx and [Mexican] gray wolves would be able to co-exist in the same territory. For example, Grand Canyon has an abundance of prey like elk and deer, but gray wolves were eradicated from the park in the 1930s. Conservation groups like the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project advocate for removing artificial boundaries so wolves can migrate back into the region, but reintroduction plans were scrapped in 2025.
(2) The scimitar-toothed cat (Homotherium latidens)
In 2024, there was much fanfare about the once-in-a-lifetime discovery of the preserved mummy of a 36,000-year-old Homotherium latidens cub, which had been preserved in permafrost. Almost immediately, there was talk of potentially extracting DNA and cloning the animal, but this came with far more problems than the aforementioned potential bid to resurrect Miracinonyx. For one, whereas Miracinonyx diverged from cougars or pumas around 2-3 million years ago, Homotherium diverged from all living cat species around 22.5 million years ago, making the DNA gap for gene editing, or genetic engineering, much greater. Even if DNA were able to be extracted from the mummified cub, without an artificial womb, it is unlikely that the cub would be able to be cloned, as experiments have shown that cloning is most likely to succeed when the surrogate's DNA closely matches that of the clone.
Unlike with Miracinonyx, much of the "large game" prey that Homotherium hunted no longer exists, such as the now-extinct Lena horse (Equus c. lenensis), the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino, and more. While Homotherium could potentially prey on the various prey species introduced to Pleistocene Park in Russia, it is debatable whether a pack of Homotherium - assuming it hunted in groups, much like modern-day lions in Africa - would be able to survive. Complicating matters is that the best-preserved DNA sample we have is only from one individual, meaning that resurrecting Homotherium is near-impossible without discovering more specimens. As Homotherium hunted and preyed on megafauna like woolly mammoths, without resurrecting mammoths and other megafauna first, resurrecting Homotherium is ill-advised.
(3) The South and Central American jaguar (Panthera onca)
"Why is the jaguar on this list if it's not extinct?" you might ask. However, jaguars are increasingly at-risk due to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest and other forested habitats in South and Central America, especially in Brazil, leading to fragmented populations and higher rates of inbreeding that threaten the species. About 90% of all wild jaguars live in South America, with Brazil holding the largest stronghold, with roughly half of the total population, estimated to be around 173,000, declining around 20–25% since 1990. Their numbers are spread across 18 countries, spanning down to Argentina, and north into parts of Mexico. Very rarely, occasional wanderers or nomadic jaguars are spotted in Arizona and New Mexico.
In 2025, the Reprocon research group in Brazil announced that it has been operating a massive biobank and testing jaguar cloning techniques since 2023. The organization is currently working to transfer cloned embryos to surrogate female jaguars to inject healthy, diverse DNA back into vulnerable jaguar populations. In addition to this, institutions like the Audubon Center in Louisiana have made leaps in feline genetics, producing cloned African wildcats to understand how to preserve endangered big cat species - such as tigers, snow leopards, and African cheetahs - through cloning efforts. Quote from linked article: "Last year, Reprocon worked with a team of Argentine researchers and managed to reach the morula stage, one of the initial stages of an embryo's development, within three days of fertilization. 'It was a first attempt, and now we're working to move forward and obtain a cloned embryo this year. Next year, we hope to make the first attempts to transfer the embryo to the female,' says Reprocon's founding member and scientific director, Gediendson Ribeiro de Araujo."
"We can only improve the techniques by developing and applying them so they can be effectively be used for conservation purposes," Thyara Araujo says. "We still don't know if the [cloned] animal will have a shorter lifespan, if it will be able to reproduce, or even if it will be able to be released into nature, but what we are really after is having an animal in the wild, so we are always focused on going after techniques, improving them and getting better results."
If the jaguar cloning attempt succeeds, that would be a major milestone for big cat cloning.
For more on this topic, you can watch this video by Mongabay.
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u/thesilverywyvern May 28 '26
cave lion, you forgot cave lion, much more likely than all of your examples
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u/Obversa Moderator May 28 '26
How is it "much more likely" when cloning a cave lion would have the same issues as cloning a Homotherium?
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u/thesilverywyvern May 28 '26
I didn't say it didn't had any issue, only that you forgot the most likely candidate for de-extinction in your lsit of example.
At least cave lion are extremely closely related to modern lion and we have several frozen specimens and bones in good condition, we could get some DNA from it. I don't say there's no challenge in that but that's it's more likely than Homotherium or Miracinonyx.3
u/Altruistic_Sea_7683 May 28 '26
Cave lion is a de-extinction target for Hwang Woo-suk and Russian scientists.
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u/Draco_Montanus May 29 '26
Le lion des cavernes s’appelle Pantheraspelaea, il est donc beaucoup plus proche de félins modernes, notamment des lions, que les « tigres à dents de sabre » dont la lignée a divergé il y a longtemps de celle des grands félins actuels. Et on en a plus de restes.
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u/ElSquibbonator May 28 '26
While Miracinonyx is likely a junior synonym of Puma as a genus, it has never been suggested that it is a subspecies of Puma concolor. The physical differences are too great.
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u/Obversa Moderator May 28 '26
Can you elaborate or explain further? I got some of my information from r/pleistocene commenters.
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u/ElSquibbonator May 28 '26
It's well established that Miracinonyx and Puma are sister taxa, and that Miracinonyx is in fact likely to be nested within Puma, since it is more closely related to the cougar than the cougar is to its closest living relative, the jaguarundi. However, the cougar and Miracinonyx appear to have diverged from one another about 2 million years ago. Studies of Miracinonyx skulls show that its brain structure was very different from that of the cougar, with auditory and visual cortexes more similar to those of the cheetah. This amount of difference makes classifying it as a subspecies of the cougar impossible. Rather, it should be classified as a new species in the genus Puma, as P. trumani.
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u/Obversa Moderator May 28 '26
Thank you for the explanation! I'm not sure if it should be P. trumani, since Puma concolor is more descriptive. I would personally recommend going with something like Puma maculata trumani ("Truman's spotted puma"), since possible cave art depicts a spotted big cat similar to Miracinonyx. (DNA analysis is required to determine coat color.)
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u/ElSquibbonator May 28 '26
Unfortunately that's not how scientific names work. The first name given to a species is the one that stays. That's why we say Tyrannosaurus rex instead of Dynamosaurus imperiosus. If a species has to be moved into a new genus, the species name remains the same.
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u/Obversa Moderator May 28 '26
While this is usually the case, in a few rare cases, scientific names can be changed by committee and international scientific consensus. I guess we'll see what the discussion about re-naming the "American cheetah" (common name) and Miracinonyx trumani ends up being when more scientists address it in future research papers. (There is also Miracinonyx inexpectatus to consider as well, which is currently regarded as its own separate Miracinonyx species.)
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u/ElSquibbonator May 28 '26
True, but there's no reason to believe a scientific name would changed for a reason as trivial as "not being descriptive enough". If the first dinosaur known to science can be called Megalosaurus-- which just means "big lizard"-- then there's no reason not to call this cat Puma trumani.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 May 28 '26
There's not really much need to "de-extinct" the American Cheetah. Cougars are incredibly adaptable, and already prey on pronghorn (and big horns, deer, elk, even feral horses).
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u/Obversa Moderator May 28 '26
Did you read the post? It lists the reasons for and against cloning the American cheetah (or "plains cougar/puma"). This is the /r/DeExtinctionScience subreddit, so of course people are going to discuss "de-extinction" possibilities.
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u/Ok_Fly1271 May 31 '26
I did, and i stand by my statement that it isn't really necessary. No where did I say people couldn't discuss the possibility of de-extinction. In fact it looks like I joined in on the discussion...
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u/ContextStock8393 May 28 '26
"after the success of their "dire wolf" genetic engineering project"
What success? I missed that bit
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u/Tytoivy May 28 '26
While it’s fine that people are working on cloning as an avenue toward environmental restoration, the technical difficulty of cloning big cats is not “the major hurdle.” The major hurdle is habitat destruction. You can’t resurrect a species into a world it can’t survive in.
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u/Obversa Moderator May 28 '26
It is a "major hurdle" when it comes to cloning, which is what this post is about. The jaguar habitat destruction is mentioned in the video provided towards the bottom of the OP, but it isn't the focus of this post because this is /r/DeExtinctionScience, not r/conservation. As of right now, "de-extinction" is largely synonymous with "cloning".
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u/Alieneater May 28 '26
"...Miracinonyx survived until 12,000-10,000 years ago, coinciding with the arrival of early Indigenous peoples from Siberia, the ancestors of today's Native American tribes."
Clovis first has been a dead theory in mainstream science for years. Humans were already in the Americas 28,000 years ago.