http://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/3407-only-catamounts-left-in-wnc-are-at-wcu
Smoky Mountain News
Only Catamounts left in WNC are at WCU
Written by Don Hendershot
Last week the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tried to put the last nail in the coffin of the eastern cougar by declaring it extinct. The cougar (catamount, panther, puma, painter, mountain lion) will surely not go quietly. This legendary gris-gris of boreal forests, eastern mountains and southeastern swamps will continue to haunt wild places on the ground and wild places in the heart for decades to come.
There also are some scientific taxonomy issues that need to be addressed regarding the eastern cougar. Fish and Wildlife adheres to taxonomy established in 1946 by S.P. Young and E.A. Goldman that lists at least 15 subspecies of cougar in North America. One of those was Felis concolor couguar – the eastern cougar. Since then, a change in the genus name from Felis to Puma has been widely accepted and the eastern cougar has been referred to as Puma concolor couguar. However, a 2000 study by M. Culver et al., which studied the DNA of 186 individuals from the 15 previously named sub-species, concluded that the entire North American population of cougars was/is one subspecies that they called Puma concolor couguar.