This animal has the gracile shape often seen in Australia.
At first I thought it was a melanistic asiatic golden cat.But the size was all wrong.
Turns out it is a P. p. delacouri, the Indochinese leopard.
And this bit about Melanism is vey interesting.
"Another explanation is that about 70 percent of selective pressures associated with the biological environment involve microbes and diseases....The types of receptors used for coat colors are also used by viruses to enter cells,” O’Brien says. Recent studies have shown that coat-color genes also affect the immune system. It is plausible that some of these color mutations are adaptive—relics of historic epidemics.
