page_title: Leopard cat
section_title: Taxonomy
hierarchical_section_title: Leopard cat / Taxonomy
caption_attribution_description: English: Tsushima Cat (one kind of Leopard cat) bred at Fukuoka zoo, Japan. 日本語: 福岡市動植物園で飼育されるツシマヤマネコ
context_page_description: The leopard cat is a small wild cat native to continental South, Southeast and East Asia. Since 2002 it has been listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List as it is widely distributed although threatened by habitat loss and hunting in parts of its range.
  Historically, the leopard cat of continental Asia was considered the same species as the Sunda leopard cat. As of 2017, the latter is recognised as a distinct species, with the taxonomic name Prionailurus javanensis.
  Leopard cat subspecies differ widely in fur colour, tail length, skull shape and size of carnassials. Archaeological evidence indicates that the leopard cat was the first cat species domesticated in Neolithic China about 5,000 years ago in Shaanxi and Henan Provinces.
context_section_description: Felis bengalensis was the scientific name proposed by Robert Kerr in 1792 for a leopard cat from Bengal.
  In the subsequent decades, 20 more leopard cat specimens were described and named, including:
  Felis nipalensis (Horsfield & Vigors,1829) from Nepal
  Felis chinensis (Gray, 1837) from Canton Province, China
  Leopardus ellioti (Gray, 1842) from the area of Bombay Presidency
  Felis horsfieldi (Gray, 1842) from Bhutan
  Felis wagati (Gray, 1867) and Felis tenasserimensis (Gray, 1867) from Tenasserim
  Felis microtis (Milne-Edwards, 1872) from the Peking area; and also from Tsushima Island.
  Felis euptilura (Elliot, 1871) based on two skins from Siberia. One was depicted in Gustav Radde's illustration cum description of a wild cat; the other was part of a collection at the Regent's Park Zoo. The ground colour of both was light brownish-yellow, strongly mixed with grey and covered with reddish-brown spots, head grey with a dark-red stripe across the cheek. The initial binomial euptilura given by Elliott has been incorrectly changed to "euptilurus" by some later authors, but under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature Article 31.2.1, nouns and noun phrases are not subject to gender agreement; at present, both terms appear in use, but only the spelling "euptilura" is correct.
  Felis manchurica (Mori, 1922) from the vicinity of Mukden in Manchuria was a light grey spotted skin.
  In 1939, Reginald Innes Pocock subordinated them to the genus Prionailurus. The collection of the Natural History Museum, London comprised several skulls and large numbers of skins of leopard cats from various regions. Based on this broad variety of skins, he proposed to differentiate between a southern subspecies P. bengalensis bengalensis from warmer latitudes to the west and east of the Bay of Bengal, and a northern P. bengalensis horsfieldi from the Himalayas, having a fuller winter coat than the southern. His description of leopard cats from the areas of Gilgit and Karachi under the trinomen Prionailurus bengalensis trevelyani is based on seven skins that had longer, paler and more greyish fur than those from the Himalayas. He assumed that trevelyani inhabits more rocky, less forested habitats than bengalensis and horsfieldi.
  Two more subspecies were proposed and described:
  P. b. alleni (Sody, 1949) from Hainan Island
  Iriomote cat P. b. iriomotensis (Imaizumi, 1967) from the island of Iriomote, one of the Ryukyu Islands in the Japanese Archipelago; Initially, the Iriomote cat was recognised as a distinct species, but following mtDNA analysis in the 1990s was considered a leopard cat subspecies.
  In the 1970s and 1980s, the Russian zoologists Geptner, Gromov and Baranova disagreed with this classification. They emphasized the differences of skins and skulls at their disposal and the ones originating in Southeast Asia, and coined the term Amur forest cat, which they regarded as a distinct species. In 1987, Chinese zoologists pointed out the affinity of leopard cats from northern China, Amur cats and leopard cats from southern latitudes. In view of the morphological similarities they did not support classifying the Amur cat as a species.
  Molecular analysis of 39 leopard cat tissue samples clearly showed three clades: a northern lineage and southern lineages 1 and 2. The northern lineage comprises leopard cats from Tsushima Islands, the Korean Peninsula, the continental Far East, Taiwan, and Iriomote Island. Southern lineage 1, comprising Southeast Asian populations, showed higher genetic diversity. Southern lineage 2 is genetically distant from the other lineages.
  Following a revision of Felidae taxonomy in 2017, two leopard cat species are now recognised, based on molecular analyses, morphological differences, and biogeographic separation:
  the mainland leopard cat (P. bengalensis) is widely distributed on mainland Asia, from Pakistan to Southeast Asia, China, and the Russian Far East.
  the Sunda leopard cat (P. javanensis) is native to Java, Bali, Borneo, Sumatra, Palawan, Negros, Cebu, Panay, and possibly the Malay Peninsula.
  Two mainland leopard c
caption: Tsushima leopard cat
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