Appalachian jaguars

During the Pleistocene, jaguars were common throughout the entire Americas, and had a size cline, i.e., in the northernmost and southernmost parts of their range, they were the largest. They no longer live in that part of their range at all, being confined to the middle section: central America up to northern Mexico and (apparently) a bit into Arizona and the rest of the southwest, and South America down to the end of the jungle regions, where the continent narrows at about the latitude of the Arica bend (also known as the Arica Elbow, or the Bolivian orocline.) However, as with most "Pleistocene extinctions", that's kind of a just-so story based on incompleteness in the fossil record, and there are plenty of first hand accounts that suggest that it's not true. Thomas Ashe, a British explorer, wrote an account of a voyage of exploration and surveying he made in the Carolinas in the early 1680s, and John Lawson, an English surveyor who wrote an account of his trip in the very earliest 1700s of the Carolinas, both of whom have first hand accounts of "tygers" which were very different animals—and they make a point of saying so—than the "panthers." The tygers were occasionally found deep in the swamps and woodlands, but are most known from beyond the western crest of the Appalachians, although they were known to roam on the eastern side as well. 

The panthers are interpreted as Puma concolor, i.e., the current mountain lion or puma, which still is seen in the Carolinas, even though "officially" they're extinct in that region. The larger, more aggressive and much less secretive tygers are interpreted as Appalachian jaguars. 

They probably were still lingering well into the late 1800s; French polymath Constantine Rafinesque claims to have seen them, and their skins up on the walls of barns, in what is today the Midwestern states west of the Appalachians, from Kentucky through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.

But like I said, official accounts of extinction are kind of suspect. In theory, there are no mountain lions in the eastern United States, but I know of many people who claim to have seen them, seen them on game cameras, and surveillance cameras, etc. throughout much of the Carolinas and other parts of the east that are not heavily populated. I don't think that they're extinct, I think that they're merely rare and very secretive. Likewise, I think most of the Pleistocene megafauna probably survived the 10,000 year or so ago extinction event in spite of what "science" tells us. Indians in the 1600 and 1700s routinely mentioned knowing of some kind of "elephants"; mastodons or Columbian mammoths or both, and of having their own curly-haired ponies that were not recently acquired Spanish mustangs, etc. So why not jaguars in America?

Jaguar itself, as a word, is of course almost certainly of a South American Injun origin, probably Tupi, which is spoken in Brazil and Paraguay and is closely related to the Guarani language, which I heard some of when I was in Argentina. Of course, nobody in North America would have called a jaguar by any word that sounded like that. I'm not aware that any North American Injun word for the cat was preserved by Ashe or Lawson, but of course, they used the word "tyger" to describe them, which is probably what we'd have called them had they lived here long enough and in enough numbers to have not become lost and forgotten as part of our original faunal assemblage. 

Man, I'm always saddened and disappointed by all of the animals that used to live here that we just missed seeing. Probably by less than "SCIENCE!" tells us that we just missed them by. There's just way too much evidence that they lingered much longer than "science!" is will to admit.