Let’s get the hard stuff over with up front. And that hard thing is:  there is no  such thing as a black panther.

What? No black panther? What about the superhero? Well, he’s different, of course. He’s real. But actual four-pawed black panthers that kind of resemble tigers? Nope. Not real.

It’s a term used for any big black cat. What we call black panthers are in fact jaguars or leopards and yes, they have spots, too. They are hard to see beneath all that black but look carefully and you can see spots as the sunlight hits them in just the right way.