🐆
Cheetah
Acinonyx jubatus
Carnivores · Vulnerable
vs
🐆
Leopard
Panthera pardus
Carnivores · Vulnerable
10 clips name both of them
12 million views between them.
Level on mass: Cheetah 50.6 kg, Leopard 53.1 kg.
To scale
Grid at 50 cm
50 cm
1 m
1.5 m
2 m
Silhouettes: PhyloPic — Lukasiniho (CC BY-NC-SA); others CC0.
Cheetah
0.80 m
at the shoulder
Human
1.70 m
full standing height
for scale
Leopard
0.72 m
at the shoulder
Tale of the tape
Body mass
51 kg
🐆 Cheetah · COMBINE
53 kg
🐆 Leopard · COMBINE
Shoulder height
0.8 m
🐆 Cheetah
0.72 m
🐆 Leopard
Body length
1.49 m
🐆 Cheetah · COMBINE
1.64 m
🐆 Leopard · COMBINE
Top speed
104 km/h
🐆 Cheetah
58 km/h
🐆 Leopard
Bite force
472 N
🐆 Cheetah
467 N
🐆 Leopard
Maximum lifespan
20 yr
🐆 Cheetah · COMBINE
27 yr
🐆 Leopard · COMBINE
Bars are sized against the larger of the two figures. Bite force figures come from individual studies and vary a lot between sources.
Animals caught on camera
Real footage of the animals on this site — hunting, fighting, and getting on with it.
Shared ancestry
The closest group they share is Felidae (family), home to 91 species.
They last shared an ancestor about 6.8 million years ago.
Estimates range from 5.7 to 7.8 million years; the figure above is the middle estimate.
About this estimate
Dates from Upham, Esselstyn & Jetz 2019, PLoS Biology 17:e3000494 (CC0).