Supermatrix and Species Tree Methods Resolve Relationships Within Panthera

The big cats of the genus Panthera proved historically difficult to resolve because of rapid speciation and conflicting gene trees. This study assembled a large multilocus supermatrix and applied both concatenation and coalescent species-tree methods to disentangle the relationships among lion, leopard, jaguar, tiger, snow leopard, and clouded leopard. The analysis supported the snow leopard as sister to the tiger and clarified the branching order among the remaining big cats. By comparing methods, the authors showed how species-tree approaches accommodate gene-tree discordance from incomplete lineage sorting, providing a robust framework for downstream studies of big-cat adaptation and conservation genetics.