The zoom at the end of the video is the interesting part. The body proportions discard an occicat. There are several species that could fit. Leopardus pardalis ocelote is the most probable, but we need to remind that Leopardus wiedii, the margay, has been registered in Texas. Without a size reference (Occelot is bigger) both are indistinguishable.
This if we assume that is not a lost pet. Seems well feed and active, so probably not, but there are several South-American species more that could fit, like the Tigrillo Leopardus tigrinus. All are smaller than an occelot
You simply can't even expect any useful photos in modern journalism, much less links to video.
__jonas 27 days ago [-]
It's crazy to me as well, but I suppose this might be a case of the rights to this video being sold exclusively to CBS or something?
rfwhyte 26 days ago [-]
No, it's more that the so called "Journalists" have directives from their editors and corporate overlords to never link to any external content that might see people who could be reading the article and thus served ads leave the site. It's purely profit motivated, and results in long winded articles describing a video where just simply watching the video itself would be infinitely more useful / informative.
beezlebroxxxxxx 27 days ago [-]
It's annoying, but it looks like the original story came from The Charlotte Observer and was distributed through Tribune Content Agency, a syndication agency.
That probably limits the embeds in the story. You also need to get permission to show the video (at least reputable sources will seek permission from the original creator). Phys.org might not be contractually or logistically able to get those permissions and add the video to the page.
shiroiushi 27 days ago [-]
In this case, perhaps. But what I'm complaining about is much more broad than that: what I see so often in modern "journalism" is they'll spew a bunch of words about something, but photographs of whatever they're referring to are conspicuously absent, or there's not nearly enough to properly supplement the commentary. It shouldn't be hard to take a handful of decent photos and attach them to the article, but for some reason, many articles I see lately just don't have the number of photographs that seem justified. It's even worse these days when you consider the zero-cost of photography. 50+ years ago it made sense for there to be few, if any, photographs: they were expensive to take (film, developing), and operating a camera took some training and skill (you needed a proper 35mm camera for print-quality photos, and a manual SLR isn't something any idiot knows how to use effectively). Now, any smartphone will take thousands of photos, and any idiot can take photos good enough to be printed, so there's really no excuse. And printing costs are zero too: I'm guessing it cost extra money to print photos 50+ years ago in magazines and newspapers, but now it's all digital so there's no incremental cost to include more photos.
And that's just photos. Video is pretty easy and free too, now that we have YouTube.
tomcam 21 days ago [-]
Margins in journalism are so compressed in the USA that very few of your expectations can be met. Only heavy advertisers like pharma, autos, etc can expect semi-decent coverage
aqfamnzc 27 days ago [-]
It's because if they include the prize, people will spend more time reading the article.
bparsons 27 days ago [-]
It blows my mind the number of articles written about a specific photo or video, without embedding or linking to said media.
adriand 28 days ago [-]
Wild animals are so amazing, and this is a wild animal that seems to me to be extra-amazing. Think about the skills required to survive in this environment. No tools! No GPS coordinates for the nearest water source. No grocery store: anything it wants to eat is as wily and tough as it is. And it’s so stealthy and elusive that we’d never see it without the use of high-tech infrared cameras. This creature is a real world superhero character.
pests 28 days ago [-]
I joke, but its stuff like this that makes the existence of bigfoot / etc possible. Take this ocelot and give him better limbs, more intelligence, and a desire / need / instinct to avoid humans at all costs.
I could see some animal / creature being so good at avoiding humans that we have never seen them but yet they are all around.
bamboozled 28 days ago [-]
If it had more intelligence than a gorilla , wouldn’t it be somewhat like us ? Why would it want to hide in the forest ?
fooker 28 days ago [-]
Because homo sapiens have killed off all other competing humanoid species in the last ~100,000 years.
Survival of the fittest ensures that if some species survived, they have to be specialized in avoiding humans.
pests 28 days ago [-]
> they have to be specialized in avoiding humans
Exactly.
What I find even more crazy is how other species of Homo were around until just 30,000 years ago and maybe as recently as 12,000. I find a lot of people have the perception that it was a much longer time but it could be as recent as the building of Gobekli Tepe.
Retric 27 days ago [-]
Significant Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA stuck around because of interbreeding so there’s disagreement around if we’re actually different species vs subspecies. It depends on how viable offspring were in general and we just don’t know.
fooker 26 days ago [-]
There are plenty of hominids we could not interbreed with. And they are all extinct too.
Retric 26 days ago [-]
> the last ~100,000 years
Homo floresiensis sure, extend that a bit you can add erectus but after that? We don’t have a lot of closely related species in the last 200,000 years.
cpeterso 27 days ago [-]
> Because homo sapiens have killed off all other competing humanoid species in the last ~100,000 years.
Non-human humanoids are instinctually perceived as threats even today in our uncanny valley response.
olalonde 28 days ago [-]
They couldn't possibly know about trail cams though.
lioeters 27 days ago [-]
They would smell the human on the cameras from miles away.
pests 27 days ago [-]
Trail cams have to be set by humans. Humans leave a scent. Maybe they evolved to blacklist any area that at any time smelled like a human.
wil421 27 days ago [-]
You describe pretty much any animal. They all want to avoid humans but there’s food all around our homes. Deer, coyotes, opossums, raccoons, turkey, and an occasional bear all live around me but are rarely seen. Most of them I only see at night on my cameras and I live in a suburban environment with a small patch of woods behind my house.
We would’ve found bones from Bigfoot by now.
mlloyd 27 days ago [-]
There's a great Dr Who episode (Listen) that hypothesized this very thing.
inversetelecine 27 days ago [-]
> they have to be specialized in avoiding humans.
I've been trying for decades now :(
fooker 26 days ago [-]
Pretend you have ~~COVID~~ ~~Swine Flu~~ Monkey Pox!
shakna 28 days ago [-]
If we had a sense of intelligence, why would we want to deal with... Us? Humanity has shown a considerable skill at eliminating other species, and a tendency to eliminate ourselves anytime we encounter something slightly different.
If you were in a forest, would you pick the bear or the man?
dvt 28 days ago [-]
> Why would it want to hide in the forest?
They are are plenty of actual humans that are isolationist. From the Amish, to the Sentinelese, to the Pintupi, plenty of peoples have purposefully curbed contact.
pests 28 days ago [-]
Probably more we don't even know about.
(offtopic: was looking at your profile, you joined HN the same week as me almost 12 years ago. how the time flies!)
0xdeadbeefbabe 27 days ago [-]
It could be intelligent and still pick a bad strategy.
trhway 28 days ago [-]
> Think about the skills required to survive in this environment.
yes, that level of skills makes a scorpion just a delicious snack for the fennec (desert fox)
They called it a “new ocelot” in the article which confused me. Annoyingly buried in the article. Also, anyone else immediately scream Babou! in their head?
mau013 28 days ago [-]
Yep yep yep
Also did you know that the origin of that joke is that Salvador Dalí had a pet ocelot named Babou which he apparently took on his travels!!
(Funny enough I just found that out this last weekend haha)
“In the 1960s, Babou was frequently seen with Dalí, who claimed to have been given the wild ocelot by the head of state of Colombia. Dalí had always been a cat lover and had an interest in exotic animals. He enjoyed a visual pun and would sometimes wear a cat pattern or coloured coat when travelling with Babou. In 1969, he was photographed leaving a Paris metro station with an anteater on a lead.
For a time in the 1960s, Dalí was more often than not accompanied by Babou. In a restaurant in Manhattan, although Babou's leash was tethered to the table, a fellow diner became quite alarmed until Dalí assured her that Babou was an ordinary cat “painted over in an op art design." On another occasion, when Babou and Dalí were visiting a gallery in Paris, Babou "made a nuisance" on some valuable 17th-century lithographs. Dalí claimed that the connection with him could only increase their value and the dealer increased the price of the lithographs by 50%. Dalí also agreed to sell the dealer a batch of his lithographs to placate him.
In 1970, Robert Wernick reported in Life magazine that Babou had a younger companion named Bouba who were led into the hotel Meurice on a leash by one of Dali's assistants and made sick by the hotel's revolving doors. The Meurice was a luxury hotel in Paris since 1815, where Dalí was a regular guest for 30 years in its best known suite, the Royal Suite, which had been home to King Alfonso XIII during his exile from Spain. Writing in his memoirs, the actor Carlos Lozano (a friend of Dalí) stated, “I only saw the ocelot smile once, the day it escaped and sent the guests at the Meurice scurrying like rats for cover.”
Babou also accompanied Dalí on a transatlantic crossing on the SS France.”*
PUSH_AX 28 days ago [-]
Thanks!
flybrand 28 days ago [-]
thank you
iambateman 27 days ago [-]
I like this, an ocelot!
shadowgovt 27 days ago [-]
One of the things I love about wildlife researchers is that so many of them seem to be driven by two parts science and one part the simple visceral pleasure of "I saw a cool cat today."
27 days ago [-]
tedchs 28 days ago [-]
They say this is the first time an ocelot has been spotted in 50 years, but I beg to differ. An ocelot is /always/ spotted.
throwup238 28 days ago [-]
Not always. Albino ocelots don’t have spots.
</nitpick of doom>
catoc 27 days ago [-]
yeah, but you don’t spot albino’celot
</I’ll show myself out>
vasco 28 days ago [-]
They also say 50 years in the title and <=10 years later: "In the past decade, another ocelot, named Lil' Jefe, has been spotted roaming in the state, the Arizona Republic reported"
IanCal 28 days ago [-]
50 years since it was seen in the area
> This was the first time an ocelot has been seen "in the Atascosa Highlands region in at least 50 years," the zoo said.
spiderfarmer 28 days ago [-]
It has been roaming spotted in the state.
HarHarVeryFunny 27 days ago [-]
It seems pretty safe to say there's a breeding population of them.
It does make you wonder if the Tasmanian Tiger may yet be found to still be around, given the way more remote and easy-to-hide-in habitats where it may be expected to be found.
28 days ago [-]
0xdeadbeefbabe 27 days ago [-]
It's less remarkable that he said his name.
nwoli 27 days ago [-]
Reddit reply
27 days ago [-]
27 days ago [-]
DaoVeles 28 days ago [-]
* Flips table! * I love it!!!
perihelion_zero 28 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Log_out_ 28 days ago [-]
Onwards to the papers to the trail to make penis pills.
ackbar03 28 days ago [-]
These stories seem to be pretty common, where some species thought to be extinct suddenly shows up somewhere. Nature seems to usually find a way. That's a beautiful cat.
MrVandemar 28 days ago [-]
When a species thought to be extinct suddenly shows up somewhere, it usually means that the species is functionally extinct anyway, it's just a matter of time.
mayneack 28 days ago [-]
I don't think it was thought to be extinct, just no longer present in AZ.
This if we assume that is not a lost pet. Seems well feed and active, so probably not, but there are several South-American species more that could fit, like the Tigrillo Leopardus tigrinus. All are smaller than an occelot
Edit: Found it here https://youtu.be/ZkkMhLq0cm0?t=18
That probably limits the embeds in the story. You also need to get permission to show the video (at least reputable sources will seek permission from the original creator). Phys.org might not be contractually or logistically able to get those permissions and add the video to the page.
And that's just photos. Video is pretty easy and free too, now that we have YouTube.
I could see some animal / creature being so good at avoiding humans that we have never seen them but yet they are all around.
Survival of the fittest ensures that if some species survived, they have to be specialized in avoiding humans.
Exactly.
What I find even more crazy is how other species of Homo were around until just 30,000 years ago and maybe as recently as 12,000. I find a lot of people have the perception that it was a much longer time but it could be as recent as the building of Gobekli Tepe.
Homo floresiensis sure, extend that a bit you can add erectus but after that? We don’t have a lot of closely related species in the last 200,000 years.
Non-human humanoids are instinctually perceived as threats even today in our uncanny valley response.
We would’ve found bones from Bigfoot by now.
I've been trying for decades now :(
If you were in a forest, would you pick the bear or the man?
They are are plenty of actual humans that are isolationist. From the Amish, to the Sentinelese, to the Pintupi, plenty of peoples have purposefully curbed contact.
(offtopic: was looking at your profile, you joined HN the same week as me almost 12 years ago. how the time flies!)
yes, that level of skills makes a scorpion just a delicious snack for the fennec (desert fox)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISsA591ApQM
Also did you know that the origin of that joke is that Salvador Dalí had a pet ocelot named Babou which he apparently took on his travels!!
(Funny enough I just found that out this last weekend haha)
He definitely did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babou_(ocelot):
“In the 1960s, Babou was frequently seen with Dalí, who claimed to have been given the wild ocelot by the head of state of Colombia. Dalí had always been a cat lover and had an interest in exotic animals. He enjoyed a visual pun and would sometimes wear a cat pattern or coloured coat when travelling with Babou. In 1969, he was photographed leaving a Paris metro station with an anteater on a lead.
For a time in the 1960s, Dalí was more often than not accompanied by Babou. In a restaurant in Manhattan, although Babou's leash was tethered to the table, a fellow diner became quite alarmed until Dalí assured her that Babou was an ordinary cat “painted over in an op art design." On another occasion, when Babou and Dalí were visiting a gallery in Paris, Babou "made a nuisance" on some valuable 17th-century lithographs. Dalí claimed that the connection with him could only increase their value and the dealer increased the price of the lithographs by 50%. Dalí also agreed to sell the dealer a batch of his lithographs to placate him.
In 1970, Robert Wernick reported in Life magazine that Babou had a younger companion named Bouba who were led into the hotel Meurice on a leash by one of Dali's assistants and made sick by the hotel's revolving doors. The Meurice was a luxury hotel in Paris since 1815, where Dalí was a regular guest for 30 years in its best known suite, the Royal Suite, which had been home to King Alfonso XIII during his exile from Spain. Writing in his memoirs, the actor Carlos Lozano (a friend of Dalí) stated, “I only saw the ocelot smile once, the day it escaped and sent the guests at the Meurice scurrying like rats for cover.”
Babou also accompanied Dalí on a transatlantic crossing on the SS France.”*
</nitpick of doom>
</I’ll show myself out>
> This was the first time an ocelot has been seen "in the Atascosa Highlands region in at least 50 years," the zoo said.
It does make you wonder if the Tasmanian Tiger may yet be found to still be around, given the way more remote and easy-to-hide-in habitats where it may be expected to be found.