Northeast African cheetah
subspecies of the cheetah
The Northeast African cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus soemmeringii) is a cheetah subspecies occurring in Northeast Africa. Contemporary records are known in South Sudan, Uganda, and Ethiopia, but population status in Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and Sudan is unknown.
It was first described under the scientific name Cynailurus soemmeringii by the Austrian zoologist Leopold Fitzinger in 1855 on the basis of a specimen from Sudan's Bayuda Desert brought to the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna. It is also known as the Sudan cheetah.
In the 1970s, the cheetah population in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia was roughly estimated at 1,150 to 4,500 individuals. In 2024, it was estimated that 533 individuals live inside protected areas in this region; the number of individuals living outside protected areas is unknown.
This subspecies is more closely related to the Southern African cheetah than to Saharan cheetah populations. Results of a phylogeographic analysis indicate that the two subspecies diverged between 16,000 and 72,000 years ago.
Taxonomy
Cynailurus soemmeringii was the scientific name proposed by Leopold Fitzinger in 1855, when he described a live male cheetah brought by Theodor von Heuglin from Sudan's Bayuda Desert in Kordofan to Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna. The name honoured Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring.
“Northeast African cheetah” enters the record as subspecies of the cheetah. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Northeast, African and cheetah can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Northeast African cheetah” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Northeast, African and cheetah provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20720735. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1855 and 2024.
A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Northeast African cheetah”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Northeast African cheetah primary sources, Northeast African cheetah archive and Northeast research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Northeast African cheetah”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Northeast African cheetah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.