More than a quarter of the animals consumed by snow leopards in the central Himalayas are livestock, according to a new study.

The finding comes at a time when the iconic species – categorised as “endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) – faces increasing threats, especially human-wildlife conflict and climate change, and when stakeholders around the world are stepping up conservation efforts.

Snow leopards are elusive denizens of alpine habitats up to 5800 metres above sea level in Asia. According to the IUCN, the total population is estimated to be between 4080 and 6590 individuals, which roam over a range of 2 million square kilometres.

Searching for scat

Conservation biologist Madhu Chetri of the Inland Norway University of Applied Science and his colleagues analysed 347 scat samples that had been collected across 5000 square kilometres in the central Himalayas in Nepal.

About half of the scat samples could be verified as belonging to snow leopards, and by analysing the DNA of hairs in the faeces, the team found that livestock, especially goats and horses, constituted 27 per cent of the snow leopard diet.

Males were twice as likely to prey on livestock than females – a phenomenon the team says might be because sexual selection has favoured high-reward activities among males even though the associated risks, such as retaliating killing, may be higher.

“It’s a really important study because so little is known about those mysterious creatures,” says Koustubh Sharma, international coordinator of the Global Snow Leopard & Ecosystem Protection Program, created by the 12 countries in which snow leopards live. “The data will lay the foundation for conservation action in the region.”

Location, location, location

“The results match our understanding of snow-leopard behaviours in other parts of the world,” says Sharma. “But prey preference at different locations can vary greatly. So this kind of study is crucial for a greater insight into the situation at each location and for monitoring how it may evolve.”

Finding out what the leopards are eating, and where, is important because “human-wildlife conflict due to livestock depredation is on the rise throughout the snow-leopard range”, says Rodney Jackson, founder of the Snow Leopard Conservancy in Sonoma, California.

“Humans and their livestock are increasingly going into snow-leopard habitats in more remote and higher-altitude areas,” says Jackson. This has been driven partly by population growth and an increasing number of livestock and partly by a warmer climate which allows herders to spend more time at higher elevations for longer, he adds.

A report released last October by TRAFFIC – an NGO in Cambridge, UK, monitoring wildlife trade – estimates that between 221 and 450 snow leopards have been killed annually since 2008, over half of them in retaliation for attacks on livestock.

Avoiding conflict

It’s crucial to establish good herding practices to allow humans and snow leopard to live together better, researchers say. For example, herders should avoid high-risk areas,  says Jackson.

Meanwhile, people should be given training for alternative livelihoods, he says, so some family members could generate income that is not livestock-based. Hopefully with time, Jackson says, “they could reduce the size of the flocks that go out there, so there would be less conflict”.

The latest study “is just a dot in a vast landscape”, says Sharma. “Much more work is needed to build a strong knowledge base upon which we could decide how best to engage with local communities.”

Read more: Hundreds of endangered wild snow leopards are killed each year

The evolutionary origin of big cats has been a mystery. Until recently, the oldest fossils, dating back to 3.8 million years ago, came from Africa, but analyses of the molecular relationships between living species suggest that big cats originated in Asia about 10.8 million years ago.

Yet an Asian origin for big cats was disputed because there was no fossil evidence during that 7-million-year gap, says , a palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

No longer. Tseng and colleagues have uncovered a partial skull, a jawbone and a few teeth belonging to a species of big cat in the Zanda basin in the south-west Tibetan plateau, dated to 5.95 to 4.10 million years ago.

The species has been named Panthera blytheae. It is a close relative of the snow leopard, which still lives on the plateau, says Xiaoming Wang, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and a co-author of the study.

“The study is very important because fossils of big cats are extremely rare,” says at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. “The new findings lend strong support for the Asian origin of big cats.”

Rethink the family tree

The fossils have also changed the family tree of these top predators, says Tseng. For instance, the origin of the Panthera genus – which includes tigers and lions – is now thought to be 16.4 million years ago, in contrast to the previous estimate of 6.4 million years ago. The timing is calculated using molecular data and fossil age, so the discovery of older fossils pushes back the estimated time of the split.

By studying the sediments at the Zanda basin and molecular remnants trapped in the fossil animal’s teeth, the team determined that the plateau was predominately an alpine grassland environment with steep cliffs, ridges and rocky outcrops. “The big cats probably didn’t spend a lot of time out in the open, but hunted around the rocks, like snow leopards do today,” says Tseng.

The big-cat fossils are just the latest addition to a string of mammalian fossils recently found in Tibet, says Wang, including pikas, horses, hyenas and pre-Ice Age fauna such as the woolly rhino and Tibetan blue sheep. “Tibet is little-studied in fossils,” says Werdelin. “But it may turn out to be a centre of origin for various groups of mammals.” These animals may subsequently have dispersed to other parts of Asia, Europe and even the Americas.

Tseng points out that while the Tibetan big-cat fossils are the oldest, they are not the most primitive. The researchers suspect that the first species of big cat might have evolved in forested regions in Asia. “The hunt is still on for the origin of the big cat,” says Tseng.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2686