Incredibly well-preserved cheetah mummies show big cats once roamed Saudi Arabia
The mummified remains of dozens of cheetahs hidden in caves in Saudi Arabia shed light on where the animals lived in the past, which could provide information on counterinsurgency efforts
“Mummified cave leopards suggest rebel activities in Saudi Arabia,” authored by Ahmed Al Bough et al, in Communications. Earth and Environment, Vol. 7, Article No. 24. Published online 15 January 2026
Researchers have discovered the mummified and skeletal remains of 61 cheetahs, which were hidden inside caves in northern Saudi Arabia for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years.
The discovery indicates that these big cats roamed the Arabian Peninsula for millennia before disappearing from the landscape about 100 years ago – evidence that bolsters efforts to rewild the area with modern cheetahs, according to Ahmed Bough, director general of the National Wildlife Center in Riyadh. He is the lead author of a study detailing conclusion which was published on Thursday communication earth and environment.
Of the 61 cheetahs found, seven were naturally mummified – dried and preserved by the Saudi Arabian desert. Baugh and colleagues dated two of these specimens and five skeletal remains, with the oldest dating back about 4,000 years and the youngest dating back 130 years.
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They also sequenced the genomes of three of the seven samples. The remains of the older cheetah were genetically similar to the northwestern African subspecies, while the remains of the more recent cheetah were more similar to the Asiatic cheetah, now restricted to a very small population mostly in Iran.
”It was a big surprise,” says Bogue. He and his colleagues suspected that the remains showed more similarity to Asiatic cheetahs, because members of that subspecies have been seen in Saudi Arabia over the past century, and their habitat today is geographically closer to northwestern Africa than it is to other Asian cheetahs.
But the findings show that this was not always the case. He says, “There appears to have been a change in whether sub-populations were present or dominant in the area over time, with no stable co-existence, as far as we can see.” “The geographical story is something we continue to tease out.”
The study does not answer why cheetahs disappeared from Saudi Arabia. Climate change probably wasn’t a factor, Baugh says, because the landscape has been harsh and dry for thousands of years. Instead he attributes the declining presence of big cats to human pressure, poaching, and the encroachment of industry and residential areas on formerly wild areas. In turn, Baugh hopes the research can help inform restoration efforts in the state, including the potential reintroduction of big cats into the landscape.
“The main insight from our discovery is that more than one subspecies of cheetah inhabits Saudi Arabia,” says Bogg. “This opens up the field significantly to how cheetahs are acquired and what the implications of diversifying the gene pool are.”
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