I have a question? Couldn' t it be cougar that people are seeing and they just have a dark color to them, therefore they say Black Panther?
There was one killed on 850 just accross the hill form Mag Co. In 97. Read below.
Body or body part:
13. KY kitten. In June, 1997, a man driving a pickup truck hit and killed an eight pound spotted female cougar kitten on Highway 850 in western Floyd County, KY. He said he also noticed a larger and a smaller shape, most likely the kitten's mother and sibling, because the kitten was still too young to be out on her own. The driver took the body to the Kentucky Department of Game & Fish, which froze it. When the kitten was analyzed, she was found to have all her claws intact, with no tattoos, tags, collars or other indication of captivity. DNA analysis indicated that the kitten's maternal ancestry included genes from South America, pointing to the pet trade (South American cougars are popular in the cougar pet trade), but paternal ancestry was shown to be North American.
This kitten is important for several reasons: she was a highway fatality, and biologists claim that if cougars were present in any numbers some would get hit by cars; she indicates that reproduction is going on in the wild; and she exemplifies the mixing of cougars from various origins that is probably occurring in the eastern woods. An April 20, 2001 letter from Steve Thomas, Wildlife biologist, KY Dept. of Fish and Wildlife Resources to Chris Bolgiano, ECF vp, confirms the above information