REC

The four rosette cats

01 · The Count

Every number below is an estimate with a date, a method and an error range. There is no live counter for any big cat, and any site that shows you one is selling something.

Jaguar NT
~173,000
estimated wild adults, range-wide
as of 2018 · ▼ decreasing · confidence moderate
Leopard VU
Unknown
no credible global total exists
as of 2026 · ▼ decreasing · confidence no global estimate
Snow leopard VU
4,000 – 6,500
estimated wild adults across 12 countries
as of 2024 · ▼ decreasing · confidence low
Amur leopard CR
130 – 150
individuals, Russia + NE China combined
as of 2024 · ▲ increasing · confidence moderate

One shape, four animals

A rosette is a broken ring, not a spot.

A cheetah has solid spots. These four wear a broken, flower-shaped ring — and each wears it differently. Learn the four and you can identify every one of them from a single patch of fur.

Jaguar the biggest rosette of the four — a broken ring of thick petals Leopard a smaller, tighter, hollow rosette Snow leopard huge, faint, smoke-grey rosettes on a pale coat Amur leopard the widest-spaced rosettes of any leopard, with the thickest black rings

Only the jaguar has dots inside the ring. No other cat on Earth does. It is the fastest identification in wildlife, and it is the single most useful thing on this website.

The honest headline

The most important sentence on this website.

There is no credible global population figure for the leopard, and the IUCN does not publish one.

The leopard is the most widespread big cat on Earth, and precisely because of that nobody has a defensible global total. Numbers like 700,000 circulate widely online and are not supported by current science. What is established is that the leopard has lost an estimated 63 to 75 per cent of its historic range. So the leopard here does not show one number. It shows eight subspecies.

See the eight

What this site does

Five things, and nothing else.

01 · The Count

Four population figures with trend and confidence shown, not hidden. High confidence gets a number. Low confidence gets a range and the words poorly surveyed.

02 · Ask Rosette

An assistant that answers any question about these four cats from a sourced corpus, in five languages — and says it has no sourced figure rather than inventing one.

03 · Go See Them

A world map of real places, real months and honest odds, with an ethics flag on every listing. Community-run operators rank first, always.

04 · The Library

Curated sources sorted by authority — primary, secondary, popular. The same material the assistant reads from.

05 · The 130

The Amur leopard count rendered as one mark per living animal rather than as a numeral. Nobody who sees it forgets the number.

06 · How we source it

Every figure traces to the IUCN Red List, a published study, or a named monitoring programme, with the retrieval date attached.

07 · The Images

Four portraits, each one teaching something you can see rather than read — the dots inside the ring, the melanistic coat, the winter fur.