The cheetahs have naturally turned into mummies in caves in Saudi Arabia

The mummified remains of seven cheetahs, some dating from thousands of years, were reported in caves in Saudi Arabia – the first great cats mummified naturally never found by scientists.

Cheetahs (Acinonyx Jubatus) have experienced a sharp drop in number due to loss of housing, hunting and animal trade. They were eradicated from the Arabian peninsula decades ago, but Ahmed Boug in the National Center for Wildlife in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and his colleagues have now reported details on seven mummified cheetahs, and the skeletal remains of 54 other people, whom they found during surveys in the North Cave in the North in 2022 and 2023.

Mummies – defined by the preservation of their soft tissues due to a stop of the disintegration process – date from between 4000 and 100 years.

“The results are really remarkable,” said Anne Schmidt-Küntzel at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. “In itself, the mummification of a Felid is not entirely surprising, but it remains a first and, with that, a very important conclusion.”

“The relatively constant temperature and the low humidity of the cave environments have been conducive to the mummification process,” according to the researchers.

We do not know why cats were in the caves, because the cheetahs are not known to use them in the form of deat or to store carcasses. None of the five caves in which they contained a water supply when questioned.

Many remains have been discovered in a single cave, accessible by a abyss, it is therefore possible that the cheetahs fall and cannot go out, explains Schmidt-Küntzel. The remains of other animals have also been found in the caves, especially those of a wolf, a striped hyena, a gazelle and a red fox.

When the researchers evaluated 20 of the complete skulls of the cheetahs, they found that six were those of the adults and the others came from animals aged 6 to 24 months. Other remains of nine cubs have also been found in the main cave. The presence of so many young cheetahs indicates that adult women may have used caves to shelter with them, explains Schmidt-Küntzel.

The camera traps deployed during the investigation revealed that they were used by wolves. “It also suggests that several, if not all, caves were accessible during the life of the Cheetahs and that the cheetahs could deliberately enter them,” explains Schmidt-Küntzel.

Although there is only one species of cheetah, there are four genetically distinct subspecies: South-East Africa cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus Jubatus), which is most common; The northeast African cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus sommemmering) and the northwest African cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus to yell), which exist in smaller and fragmented populations; and the Asian cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus hunting), of which there are very few individuals in Iran.

Boug and his team sequenced the genomes of three remains, which showed that the most recently mummified individual seemed to be most closely linked to the Asian subspecies, as we would expect, Iran being closest to the locations where the subspecies of the cheetah showed similarities. in the region then.

Schmidt-Küntzel says that work maintains the idea that all the subspecies of the cheetah could adapt to the same arid conditions, so that they can be reintroduced in the region by raising captive individuals from more African subspecies.

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