The Sentinel

David Shepherd

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"The Sentinel"
Signed, limited edition
Date of publication 1990
Image Size 18" x 30"
mint condition

Melanistic leopards are also called black panthers.
Melanism in leopards is caused by a recessive allele and inherited as a recessive trait.
Interbreeding in melanistic leopards produces a significantly smaller litter size than is produced by normal pairings.
The black leopard is common foremost in tropical and subtropical moist forests like the equatorial rainforest of the Malay Peninsula and the tropical rainforest on the slopes of some African mountains such as Mount Kenya.
Between January 1996 and March 2009, leopards were photographed at 16 sites in the Malay Peninsula in a sampling effort of more than 1,000 camera trap nights.
Of the 445 photographs of melanistic leopards, 410 were taken in study sites south of the Kra Isthmus, where the non-melanistic morph was never photographed.
These data indicate the near-fixation of the dark allele in the region.
The expected time for the fixation of this recessive allele due to genetic drift alone ranged from about 1,100 years to about 100,000 years.
Pseudomelanistic leopards have also been reported.
The leopard is one of the five extant species in the genus Panthera, a member of the cat family, Felidae.
It occurs in a wide range in sub-Saharan Africa, in some parts of Western and Central Asia, Southern Russia, and on the Indian subcontinent to Southeast and East Asia.

Titled 'The Sentinel', this painting of a leopard was published in 1990 by Solomon and Whitehead.
This print is a limitewd edition of 1500, each copy hand signed by David Shepherd, numbered, and stamped with the publisher's embossed seal.