MSU's biggest fat cat

The hide and skeleton of a large, male ocelot is the newest addition to the MSU Biology Department's prestigious specimen collection.

The collection, which includes more than 23,000 specimens and is ranked 35th in the nation, is already filled with drawers of neatly labeled wood rats, bats, havelinas, bobcats and hedgehogs.

More than 15,000 of the stuffed bodies, skeletons or hides are from Texas, but others come from Finland, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, Canada and Latin America.

But the ocelot will be MSU's first.

He's probably the first ocelot in any Texas specimen collection, biology professor Fred Stangl said. The discovery of the large, 36-pound body that was so far from any known population of ocelots has created a mystery that Stangl and other local wildlife officials are still trying to solve.

What was he doing there?

"They're just awfully secretive animals anyway," Stangl said. "It's one animal you can never say for certain what you're dealing with."

This ocelot was roadkill, found dead on a highway near Mineral Wells in late March. He was more than 400 miles from the two southernmost counties in Texas where about 80 to 120 of such animals are known to live.

The woman who found him and collected his carcass off the road had called a Texas game warden and said she initially thought she'd found a bobcat but now was certain it was an ocelot.

The game warden from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department was skeptical and clearly surprised when he went to see what turned out to be, indeed, a dead ocelot.

The questions then became: Was he wild? Was he someone's pet? Was he part of the known ocelot population nearly 400 miles away? Or was there an undocumented population along the upper Brazos River?

"Just documenting the presence ù that's a biogeographic contribution," Stangl said.

The ocelot carcass first went to Brownsville, where staff at the Gladys Porter Zoo conducted a necropsy ù an animal autopsy.

The 36-pound male was a "fat cat," bigger even than a 25-pound body that would have ranked "huge," according to expert Dr. Michael Tewes of Texas A&M-Kingsville's Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute. Tewes was interviewed about the cat by the Houston Chronicle for an article about the ocelot published April 12.

"When I saw the ocelot, I said, æThat's a chubby boy!' " Tewes said then. "You don't see fat, wild ocelots."

Tewes decided that Chubby was not a wild ocelot but most likely a pet ù a determination with which Stangl disagrees.

Tewes drew his conclusion from the fact that the ocelot didn't have the usual nicks and scars, ear notches or battered footpads of wild ocelots. Eventually, tissue samples from the ocelot were sent to the Genetic Resources Collection of Texas Tech University, and the pelt and skeleton went to MSU for safekeeping.

"We can't prove it's an escapee," Stangl said as he held the furry, spotted hide in both hands and laid it out flat on a cabinet.

He cupped the skull in his hands.

Alongside Chubby, he laid a stuffed bobcat, for size comparison.

He was as large as Stangl's largest bobcat.

"It's a research collection, not a gee-whizzy thing," he said of the newest member of MSU's collection. "It's a study collection. We don't go in to ooh and ahh. It will be shown to an occasional class where that material is appropriate."

He is still pondering the mystery of how Chubby traveled to Highway 180.

Even when such cats live nearby, one rarely sees them because of their sneaky behavior, he said.

Stangl did his own study of the specimen and wrote a paper on the Leopardus pardalis, concluding that Chubby had demonstrated evidence of successfully foraging in the wild ù four rodents in his tummy ù yet displayed the superb physical condition of an escaped captive.

Thus, the mystery.

No nearby zoos were missing an ocelot, and no report of a missing ocelot was posted by any private owner.

Stangl found some mention of ocelots in the Palo Pinto County in past years from hunters and fishermen during the 1950s.

This ocelot doesn't prove the species lives in the rugged terrain of limestone and shale, shaded by oaks and red cedars, he said, "but neither can the specimen be ignored or dismissed as the inconvenient occurrence of an escaped captive."

Even the wildcats that do live in the area are rarely seen. "It is conceivable that such an uncommon and secretive species as L. pardalis could easily escape notice," he wrote.

Or, they might be misidentified as bobcats or mountain lions. A sighting might go unreported because the outdoorsman may be unaware of how important that information would be to the history of the area.

With Chubby tucked snugly in MSU's collection, he now officially belongs to the state, and he will "last longer than my grandkids will be alive," Stangl said.

The MSU collection began in 1952 with a possum donated by the late naturalist and explorer Walter Dalquest, a professor of biology there.

Every single specimen contained there is irreplaceable and is now available for any comparative studies that require such a species ù preventing scientists or students anywhere in the country from having to kill such a treasure to study it.

"It basically just belongs to science," Stangl said.