Cougars Wallpaper, #512

The Cougar (Puma concolor), also puma, mountain lion, panther, or painter depending on region, is a mammal of the Felidae family, native to the Americas. This large, solitary cat has the greatest range of any wild terrestrial mammal in the Western Hemisphere, extending from Yukon in Canada to the southern Andes of South America. An adaptable, generalist species, the Cougar is found in every major New World habitat type. It is the second heaviest cat in the New World, after the jaguar, and the fourth heaviest in the world, along with the leopard after the tiger, lion, and jaguar, although it is most closely related to smaller felines.The Cougar has numerous names in English, of which puma and mountain lion are popular. Other names include catamount, panther, and mountain screamer. Lexicographers regard painter as a primarily upper-Southern U.S. regional variant on "panther", but a folk etymology, fancying a resemblance between the typically dark tip of its tail and a paintbrush dipped in dark paint, has some currency.[citation needed]The Cougar holds the Guinness record for the animal with the highest number of names, presumably due to its wide distribution across North and South America. It has over 40 names in English alone."Cougar" is borrowed from the Portuguese çuçuarana, via French; the term was originally derived from the Tupi language. A current form in Brazil is suçuarana. "Puma" comes, via Spanish, from the Quechua language of Peru.