Northeast African cheetah | |
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A female cheetah in Zoo Landau, Germany | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Mammalia |
Order: | Carnivora |
Suborder: | Feliformia |
Family: | Felidae |
Subfamily: | Felinae |
Genus: | Acinonyx |
Species: | |
Subspecies: | A. j. soemmeringii[1]
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Trinomial name | |
Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii[1] (Fitzinger, 1855)
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A. j. soemmeringii range (brown) | |
Synonyms | |
A. j. megabalica (Heuglin), 1863
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The Northeast African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii) is a cheetah subspecies occurring in Northeast Africa. Contemporary records are known in South Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, but population status in Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan is unknown.[2]
It was first described under the scientific name Cynailurus soemmeringii by the Austrian zoologist Leopold Fitzinger in 1855 on the basis of a specimen from Sudan’s Bayuda Desert brought to the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna.[3] It is also known as the Sudan cheetah.[4]
In the 1970s, the cheetah population in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia was roughly estimated at 1,150 to 4,500 individuals.[5] In 2024, it was estimated that 533 individuals live inside protected areas in this region; the number of individuals living outside protected areas is unknown.[2]
This subspecies is more closely related to the Southern African cheetah than to Saharan cheetah populations. Results of a phylogeographic analysis indicate that the two subspecies diverged between 16,000 and 72,000 years ago.[6]
HarperFrancis
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