🐆
Cheetah
Acinonyx jubatus
Carnivores · Vulnerable
vs
🐆
Snow leopard
Panthera uncia
Carnivores · Vulnerable
One clip names both of them
151,500 views between them.
Level on mass: Cheetah 50.6 kg, Snow leopard 47.8 kg.
To scale
Grid at 50 cm
50 cm
1 m
1.5 m
2 m
Silhouettes: PhyloPic — Gabriela Palomo-Munoz (CC BY-NC); others CC0.
Cheetah
0.80 m
at the shoulder
Human
1.70 m
full standing height
for scale
Snow leopard
0.60 m
at the shoulder
Tale of the tape
Body mass
51 kg
🐆 Cheetah · COMBINE
48 kg
🐆 Snow leopard · COMBINE
Shoulder height
0.8 m
🐆 Cheetah
0.6 m
🐆 Snow leopard
Body length
1.49 m
🐆 Cheetah · COMBINE
1.22 m
🐆 Snow leopard · COMBINE
Top speed
104 km/h
🐆 Cheetah
no figure yet
🐆 Snow leopard
Bite force
472 N
🐆 Cheetah
no figure yet
🐆 Snow leopard
Maximum lifespan
20 yr
🐆 Cheetah · COMBINE
21 yr
🐆 Snow 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).