Does anybody know anything about Goldman's Jaguar. The only info I have found is that Cameron Park zoo has them and that they live in Central and North America. I'm slightly confused by it's taxonomical existence so if anybody has any information on them that would be great.
How common are they in the wild? I would expect that they would struggle in more arid areas and that competition with Pumas would be particularly bad in North America.
Jaguars and pumas co-exist in large parts of Central and South America, why would it be a problem in North America?
goldmani is the Yucatan Jaguar, supposedly restricted to the Yucatan Peninsula south through Belize to Honduras. I have not heard of it being combined as being North American as well. The North American subspecies have been arizonensis, hernandesii, and veraecrucis (the latter two combined with the first since the 1930s), while in the rest of Central America there has been centralis (south to Colombia). However, as noted by the others above, subspecies are not generally recognised for Jaguar today. Especially in the North and Central American region there is no basis for separating populations as subspecies.
Ok that cleared up the history of Jaguar subspecies although is there any reason why there were so many different classifications even though they had no basis for separation?
Well you're going back 120 years. There were different ideas on speciation then, they used geographical (and political) boundaries, minor physical differences, etc, and they had no genetic testing obviously. What we can say now about taxa separation is not equivalent to what they knew or understood over a century ago.
It's partly true, at least for Central America. I quote from Wainwright's "The mammals of Costa Rica":
We also can't forget that they used to share territory in North America. Jaguars ranged from Texas to Monterey California.
And possibly futher. We know they went as far north as Oklahoma and possibly significantly further north and east than there.
Pleistocene jaguar occured north into Washington and east in to Florida and Pennsylvania, based on fossil founds.
