The ghost of the peninsula
The Korean leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) is now considered locally extinct in South Korea, a ghost cat whose last confirmed trace was a photograph taken in 1969. While the IUCN notes the last capture of a wild leopard was in 1970 on Yeohangsan Mountain, the 1969 image is the final photographic proof of a wild population. This subspecies, also known as the Amur leopard, once roamed the entire Korean Peninsula, an apex predator in its mountain forest ecosystems. Historical records even show leopards entering the city of Seoul during the late 19th century.
The population's collapse was rapid and severe. During the Japanese colonial period (1910-1945), the government instituted a varmint extermination project that classified leopards, tigers, bears, and wolves as pests to be hunted without limit. This policy, combined with widespread trophy hunting, had a devastating effect. Official statistics from the Governor-General of Korea show that at least 624 leopards were killed between 1919 and 1942 alone. By the end of the occupation in 1945, the species was already exceptionally rare, pushed to the brink of total disappearance from the southern half of the peninsula.
A search for survivors
Decades after the last sighting, scientists and conservationists hold out slim hope for the leopard's return. The mountainous terrain of Gangwon Province, near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), is the most likely area where a remnant population could have survived. Extensive camera-trap surveys have been conducted in South Korea's remote forests to find any evidence of surviving leopards. These non-invasive methods are highly effective for monitoring nocturnal species. Despite these systematic searches, no leopards have been detected. The surveys have successfully captured images of other rare wildlife, like the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), but the larger apex predator remains absent.
The Amur leopard subspecies survives today, but only in a small, critically endangered population of about 130 individuals located in a sliver of territory along the border of Russia and China. The prospects for a natural return to the Korean peninsula are impeded by human infrastructure and the long distance from this remaining population.
A unique genetic legacy in a jar
With no living specimens left in South Korea, the only way to study the peninsula's lost leopards is through museum artifacts. A 2020 phylogenetic study extracted mitochondrial DNA from an old leopard skin that was collected in the 1930s. The analysis confirmed that the Korean population belonged to the Amur leopard subspecies, Panthera pardus orientalis.
The study revealed something more: the Korean leopard possessed a unique genetic haplotype, designated KOR1. This distinct genetic signature differed from the known haplotypes found in the current Russia/China population. This finding indicates that the Korean leopards were not a temporary or transient group but a well-established, genetically distinct branch of the subspecies. A separate project decoding the Amur leopard genome found the species has 2.57 billion base pairs and about 19,000 genes. The extinction of the South Korean population, therefore, is the permanent loss of unique genetic diversity, a final chapter written by the DNA preserved in a museum.