Incredible Cheetah Mummies Show Big Cats Once Roamed the Arabian Peninsula
January 15, 2026
2 min reading
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Incredibly well-preserved cheetah mummies show felines that once roamed Saudi Arabia
The naturally mummified remains of dozens of cheetahs hidden deep in caves in Saudi Arabia are shedding light on where these animals lived in the past, which could inform rewilding efforts.
Ahmed Boug et al./Earth and Environment Communications
Researchers have discovered the naturally mummified and skeletal remains of 61 cheetahs, hidden deep in caves in northern Saudi Arabia for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
The discovery indicates that these big cats roamed the Arabian Peninsula for millennia before disappearing from the landscape between 49 and 188 years ago – evidence that supports efforts to rewild the region with modern-day cheetahs, according to Ahmed Boug, director general of the National Wildlife Center in Riyadh. He is the lead author of a study detailing the results published Thursday in Earth & Environment Communication.
Of the 61 cheetahs discovered, seven were naturally mummified, dried and preserved in the Saudi Arabian desert. Boug and his colleagues carbon dated two of these specimens and five of the skeletal remains, with the oldest living about 4,000 years ago and the youngest about 130 years ago.
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They also sequenced the genomes of three of the seven specimens sampled. The remains of older cheetahs were more genetically similar to a Northwest African subspecies, while the remains of more recent cheetahs were more similar to the Asiatic cheetah, which is now mostly confined to a very small population in Iran.
“It was a big surprise,” Boug says. He and his colleagues suspected the remains would bear more similarities to Asiatic cheetahs, because members of that subspecies have been sighted in Saudi Arabia over the past century and their habitat today is geographically closer than northwest Africa.
But the results suggest that this was not always the case. “There appears to have been a change in the subpopulation present or dominant in the area over time, not stable coexistence to our knowledge,” he says. “Geographic history is something we continue to discover.”
The study does not answer why cheetahs disappeared from Saudi Arabia. Climate change is probably not a factor, Boug says, because the landscape has been harsh and arid for thousands of years. Instead, he attributes the dwindling presence of big cats to human pressures, both from poaching and the encroachment of industrial and residential areas into formerly wild areas. In turn, Boug hopes the research can help inform rewilding efforts in the kingdom, including the possible reintroduction of big cats to the landscape.
“The main conclusion of our discovery is that more than one subspecies of cheetah inhabited Saudi Arabia,” explains Boug. “This greatly opens the field to how cheetahs are obtained and the implications of introducing diversity into the gene pool.”
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