Is this true? i just got it from http://www.memail.com newsletter.
FACT OF THE WEEK: There is no single cat called the panther. The name is commonly applied to the leopard, but it is also used to refer to the puma and the jaguar. A black panther is really a black leopard.
Not only that, but ‘cougar’, ‘puma’ and ‘mountain lion’ all refer to the same animal as well.
This is one of the reasons Linnaeus’s binomial Latin system of nomenclature is used.
It would have only taken a few seconds to look that up in a dictionary:
pan•ther "pan(t)-ther\ noun pl panthers also panther [ME pantere, fr. OF, fr. L panthera, fr. Gk panther] (13c)
1 : leopard: as
a : a leopard of a hypothetical exceptionally large fierce variety
b : a leopard of the black color phase
2 : cougar
3 : jaguar
©1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Surely we have better things to do than answer all of these email factoids ourselves?
Just for the future, there is no language called ‘chinese’ Chinese is a group of languages.
Wood Thrush said
Huh?
Jim