A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
jaguarundi
The jaguarundi is a small cat of the Americas that does not look much like a cat. It has a long low body, short legs, a small flattened head, small rounded ears, and a very long tail, and its coat is unspotted, either dark gray-brown or a rusty red. It is active by day, which is unusual among cats, and it moves through dense low cover close to the ground rather than climbing.
Etymology
The name came into Portuguese and Spanish from Tupi and Guaraní, languages of Brazil and Paraguay. In parts of Mexico and Central America the animal has a Spanish name that describes it better than any of the scientific attempts: leoncillo, little lion, for the plain coat and the small head, and it is also called gato moro and, in Belize, the otter cat.
Notes
The two color forms were long taken for separate species and were described separately, but both can appear in the same litter. Genetic work has placed the jaguarundi closest to the puma rather than to the small spotted cats it lives alongside, and the two are now understood to share a fairly recent common ancestor.