Cheetahs naturally turned into mummies in caves in Saudi -Arabia

One of the cheetah mummies inside the cave it was found in

Ahmed Boug et al. 2025/National Center for Wildlife, Saudi -Arabia

The mummified remains of seven cheetahs, some dates thousands of years, are reported in caves in Saudi Arabia – the first naturally mummified large cats ever found by scientists.

Cheetahs (Acinonyx Jubatus) Has experienced a steep decrease in the number as a result of the loss of habitats, hunting and pet shops. They were eradicated from the Arabian Peninsula decades ago, but Ahmed Boug at the National Center for Wildlife in Riyadh, Saudi -Arabia and Hans Colleugues have now reported details of seven mummified cheetahs and skeleton -remakes from 54 others, such as the Fond Cave Network in Northern Saudi Arabia in 202 and 2023.

The mummies – defined by preserving their soft tissue due to a stop of the due process – date from between 4000 and 100 years ago.

“The results are not a remarkable,” says Anne Schmidt-Küntzel at the Cheetah Conservation Fund in Namibia. “In itself, the mummification of a felid is not a prone surprise, but it remains a first and with it a very important finding.”

“The relatively constant temperature and low humidity in the basement surroundings have been conducive to the mummification process,” according to the researchers.

It is unclear why the cats were in the caves as cheetahs are not known to use them as its or to store carcasses. None of the five caves in which they were found contained a water supply when examined.

Many of the remains were discovered in just one cave, available with a swallowing hole, so it is possible that the cheetahs fell in and could not be out, says Schmidt-Küntzel. The remains of other animals are also found in the caves, including a wolf, striped hyena, gasle and red fox.

When the researchers assessed 20 of the complete cheetah skulls, they found that six were for adults and the rest were from animals that were 6 to 24 months old. Other remnants of nine kids were also found in the hand cavity. The presence of so many young cheetahs suggests that adult woman may have used the caves to protect them, says Schmidt-Küntzel.

Cameric traps implemented during the study revealed that they were used by wolves. “This also suggests that more people, if not all, of the caves were available in the life of the Cheetahs, and that the cheetahs could have deliberately entered into them,” says Schmidt-Küntzel.

Although there is onely a species of cheetahs, there are oven genetically different subsections: the Southeast African Gepard (Acinonyx Jubatus Jubatus), Which is most common; The Northeast African cheetahs (Acinonyx Jubatus Soidsingiii) and the Northwest African Gepard (Acinonyx Jubatus Hecki) Found in smaller, fragmented populations; and the Asian Gepard (Acinonyx Jubatus Venaticus), of which there are very few individuals in Iran.

Boug and his team sequenced the genomes in three sets of the remains, which showed that the most recently mummified individual seemed to be most related to the Asian substance, which could be experimented with Iran, which was the closest of the places where but analyzed two older samples, from 3000 and 4,000 years ago, showed similar to the Northwest African Cheetah, which also suggested that this subposts were in the area.

Schmidt-Küntzel says the work supports the idea that all cheetahs taught could adapt to the same dry conditions so that they could be reintroduced to the area by breeding prisoners from several many African subsections.