Animal · China, India, Nepal
Snow leopard
Panthera uncia — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The snow leopard is a rare, thick-furred big cat that lives high in the mountains of Central Asia. Its pale, smoky coat makes it almost invisible against rocky, snowy slopes.
Picture credit: Sastognuti (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Eric Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Eric Kilby (CC BY-SA 2.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the snow leopard live?
Home: High mountains of Central Asia.
In the wild you find it in: China, India, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Pakistan.
Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.
The short profile
Fully grown it measures 1.2 m long, plus a 1 m tail. It weighs about 40 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
A snow leopard's tail is almost as long as its body and up to 10 cm thick with fur, working as a warm scarf when it curls up to sleep and as a balancing pole on steep cliffs. It can leap up to 15 metres in a single bound, further than any other cat, thanks to powerful hind legs built for jumping between rocks. Snow leopards live so high and so spread out across remote mountains that they are nicknamed 'ghosts of the mountains' because they are rarely seen even by researchers. Hunting of their prey, conflict with herders, and climate change shrinking their cold habitat all threaten this elusive cat today.
Find it on the globe
Snow leopard is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Are snow leopards dangerous?
Snow leopards are shy and avoid humans, with no confirmed wild attack on a person ever recorded. They prefer to hunt wild sheep and goats far from people, high in remote mountains.
Why are snow leopards called ghosts of the mountains?
Snow leopards are so well camouflaged and live so spread across huge, remote mountain ranges that even scientists rarely spot them in the wild. This mysterious, hard-to-find nature earned them their ghostly nickname.
How many snow leopards are left?
Roughly 4,000 to 6,500 snow leopards are estimated to remain in the wild across the mountains of Central Asia. Their numbers are hard to count precisely because they live in such remote, rugged terrain.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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