WILKINS ET AL.: FLORIDA PANTHER MORPHOLOGY


Table 4. Frequency of occurrence of whorl and kinked tail in specimens and live captures of Florida
cougars.

 Whorl % Kink %
Locality n Present Occurrence n Present Occurrence

Southwest Florida' 54 50 92.6 49 433 87.8
Historical Southeast2 9 5 55.5 post-cranial skeletons not available
Recent Southeast3 9 2 22.2 10 1 10.0
Total 72 59

'Al specimens from Big Cypress and other regions west of Shark Slough.
2Specimens taken by Bongo and Cory in the late 1800s
'Includes Everglades and two individuals from Palm Beach County, one of which had a skin.


The cranial profile was duplicated with a carpenter's contour gauge. The gauge
was placed 1/8" to the left of the midline of the skull. The tip of the nasals and the
point at which the contour gauge intersected the temporal line (ridge of bone that
curves forward from the saggital crest towards the post-orbital process) provided
two consistent reference points (Fig. 7a). When the images produced by the
contour were rotated with reference to a horizontal line (Fig. 7b) and
superimposed, the distinctive inflated nasal region of P. concolor coryi becomes
apparent (Fig. 7c). A total of 338 specimens representing 29 subspecies were
measured. Some taxa are represented by a single or few specimens. Each contour
was digitized using the mensuration program Sigma Scan. The images were
interpolated to increments of 0.05 inches. The contours were normalized on both
the X and Y axes; along the X axis to eliminate the variation due to size alone, and
along the Y axis to define the highest point on the curve (highest point is Y=l)
(Fig. 8) In the final data set, each contour measurement consisted of 20 values,
each value representing an increment of 0.05 inches along the profile.
 The highest point of the crania of most subspecies is the frontal region, the
nasals gradually sloping from there. In the skulls of most P. c. coryi the frontal
region is flat relative to the highly arched nasals, so the inflated nasal region
becomes the highest point on the P. c. coryi skulls. This is shown in the
comparison of a normalized profile of a Florida panther skull compared to one
from Colorado (Fig. 8). The point on the X axis where Y=1.0 (the highest point)
then becomes a measure of the degree of inflation at the anterior portion of the
cranium. The closer that high point is to X=0, the greater the inflation of the
nasals. The means, standard deviation, and minimum-maximum values for the
highpoint were calculated and compared. The contour values were not normally
distributed. For this reason, and because some classes contained small samples,
the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxan 2-tailed non-parametric test was used to test for
differences in the means between (1) males and females, (2) historic P. c. coryi and