What is the largest big cat in the Americas?

The jaguar, and it hunts differently from every other big cat. Lions, tigers and leopards kill by suffocation, clamping the throat or muzzle. A jaguar bites through the skull, driving its canines between the ears into the brain - it has the strongest bite relative to size of any cat, evolved for cracking turtle shells and armadillo armour.

It is also the only big cat entirely comfortable in water, hunting caiman and fish and swimming rivers by choice. The name comes through Portuguese from a Tupi word usually glossed as the beast that kills in one bound.

It was central to Mesoamerican religion for three thousand years - Olmec, Maya and Aztec all built rulership imagery around it, and the Aztec jaguar warriors were an elite order. Its range once ran from the southwestern United States to Argentina and has contracted by around half. A small number have returned to Arizona in recent decades, individual males photographed by camera traps, and a border wall across their route is the reason there is unlikely to ever be a breeding population there again.