@anderson_joshuaA cat with a tail longer than seems reasonable, legs that sit oddly short under a stretched-out frame, and a look that keeps getting logged as something else entirely. That is the jaguarundi, and in Texas it has been officially absent for close to forty years. The paper trail stops at 1986, the last confirmed record in the state. Since then, researchers have logged more than 350,000 camera-trap nights across Texas and come up with no jaguarundi frames at all. That is a serious stretch of watching for nothing. Which is why the reports of possible sightings have stirred things up again. Nothing is settled. The species is still doing fine down in Mexico, so the animal itself is not the question. What nobody can answer is whether it has slipped back into Texas unnoticed, or whether people are clocking ordinary house cats and letting their imagination do the rest. Either way the return stays unconfirmed. For a wild cat that has kept out of sight this long, the mystery is doing most of the work.

@anderson_joshuaA cat with a tail longer than seems reasonable, legs that sit oddly short under a stretched-out frame, and a look that keeps getting logged as something else entirely. That is the jaguarundi, and in Texas it has been officially absent for close to forty years. The paper trail stops at 1986, the last confirmed record in the state. Since then, researchers have logged more than 350,000 camera-trap nights across Texas and come up with no jaguarundi frames at all. That is a serious stretch of watching for nothing. Which is why the reports of possible sightings have stirred things up again. Nothing is settled. The species is still doing fine down in Mexico, so the animal itself is not the question. What nobody can answer is whether it has slipped back into Texas unnoticed, or whether people are clocking ordinary house cats and letting their imagination do the rest. Either way the return stays unconfirmed. For a wild cat that has kept out of sight this long, the mystery is doing most of the work.