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Other than humans, they have the widest spread of any land animal in the Western Hemisphere. Their distribution reaches the southernmost tip of South America from northern Canada. Due to their adaptability, they can live in a variety of environments, including deserts, snow-covered mountains, and tropical rainforests.
No animal has more common names. The most common names for this animal in English are mountain lion, cougar, puma, and panther, however there are more than 40 other names for it. That's what you get when an animal is discovered in such a large area: it will contain a variety of linguistic groups.
Only the lion, tiger, and jaguar are larger than the puma, making it the fourth largest cat in the world. It is larger than the leopard and snow leopard, which belong to the Pantherinae subfamily of felines and are truly big cats, while being classified as a "small cat" in zoological terminology.
They are mass extinction survivors. The majority of the megafauna (animals weighing 90 pounds or more) in the Americas inexplicably disappeared around 12,000 years ago. Only the cougar and jaguar of the eight great cat species that once roamed the Western Hemisphere survived, with the Beringian and American lions, scimitar-toothed cats, North American and South American saber-toothed cats, and American false cheetahs all becoming extinct.