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Study

Hyoid apparatus and pharynx in the lion (Panthera leo), jaguar (Panthera onca), tiger (Panthera tigris), cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) and domestic cat (Felis silvestris f. catus)

Weissengruber, G. E.; Forstenpointner, G.; Peters, G.; Kübber-Heiss, A.; Fitch, W. T.

Journal of Anatomy, 2002

Peer-reviewedcomparative studylaboratory

What they did

The hyoid apparatus — the chain of small bones and ligaments suspending the larynx — was dissected and described in five cat species spanning the roaring and non-roaring groups.

Studied in
Panthera leo, Panthera onca, Panthera tigris, Acinonyx jubatus, Felis catus
Sample size
specimens dissected across five felid species

What they found

In the lion, tiger and jaguar one element of that chain, the epihyoid, is an elastic ligament rather than a bone. In the cheetah and the domestic cat it is fully ossified. The species with the elastic element roar; the species with the bony one purr.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

The incompletely ossified hyoid of the roaring cats is associated with their capacity for loud low-frequency calls, and with the absence of true purring.

How NatureHQ reads it

This is the anatomical half of "tigers cannot purr" and it is genuinely solid: the chain that suspends a tiger’s larynx is built differently from a house cat’s. It is worth being careful about what it shows, though. It establishes a correlation across species between one anatomical feature and a vocal repertoire, which later larynx experiments largely explained. Anatomy this clean is persuasive, but the mechanism turned out to sit mostly in the vocal folds rather than in the bone.

Limitations

  • Small numbers of specimens per species, as with all comparative dissection.
  • Correlational: it identifies a feature that tracks roaring, not the mechanism producing it.
  • The hyoid explanation has since been partly superseded by work on vocal-fold tissue.

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

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Finding the paper

Published by: Wiley journalsPublished in a Wiley journal.

doi.org/10.1046/j.1469-7580.2002.00088.x

This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref on 2026-08-11.

NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-11.