Description

This is a urethane plastic replica cast of a huge male jaguar skull. The jaguar is the third largest living cat in the world and is the most powerfully built of any living cat. It also has the strongest jaws, proportionate to body size, of any cat and is the only felid to habitually kill its larger prey with a bite to the skull, as opposed to other species that kill by placing a suffocating bite on the nose or throat of the victim. Jaguars are superficially similar to leopards but are much stockier and have larger, heavier skulls. The jaguar’s canine teeth are very robust and make the canines of other big cats like leopards and cougars look like ice picks in comparison. The jaguar is also the only big cat to specialize in reptilian prey in certain habitats, and it uses its massive railroad spike fangs to piece the shells of turtles and crack the skulls of crocodiles.
Of all of the big cats, the jaguar is most comparable in build to some of the extinct sabertoothed cats, especially the smilodon family, which excelled at wrestling large prey to the ground. This characteristic also makes the jaguar an excellent climber for an animal that can weigh up to 350lbs.
The skull is 11 1/4″ long by 7 1/2″ wide (total score of 18 3/4″, which puts it in the Safari Club all time top ten record size range, even though the original skull came from a captive animal and would not have been eligible for record book inclusion). Every detail has been captured, right down to the texture of the bone and the open nerve and blood vessel holes in the skull. This replica has been cast in two different colors of urethane for added realism – untinted (white) for the teeth and off white for the bone.