Felis uncia was the scientific name used by Johann Christian Daniel von Schreber in 1777 who described a snow leopard based on an earlier description by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, assuming that the cat occurred along the Barbary Coast, in Persia, East India and China. The genus name Uncia was proposed by John Edward Gray in 1854 for Asian cats with a long and thick tail. Felis irbis proposed by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg in 1830 was a skin of a female snow leopard collected in the Altai Mountains. He also clarified that several leopard (P. pardus) skins were previously misidentified as snow leopard skins. Felis uncioides proposed by Thomas Horsfield in 1855 was a snow leopard skin from Nepal in the collection of the Museum of the East India Company.
Uncia uncia was used by Reginald Innes Pocock in 1930 when he reviewed skins and skulls of Panthera species from Asia. He also described morphological differences between snow leopard and leopard skins.Panthera baikalensis-romanii proposed by a Russian scientist in 2000 was a dark brown snow leopard skin from the Petrovsk-Zabaykalsky District in southern Transbaikal.
The snow leopard was long classified in the monotypic genus Uncia. It was subordinated to the genus Panthera based on results of phylogenetic studies.
Until spring 2017, there was no evidence available for the recognition of subspecies. Results of a phylogeographic analysis indicate that three subspecies should be recognised:
P. u. uncia in the range countries of the Pamir Mountains
P. u. irbis in Mongolia, and
P. u. uncioides in the Himalayas and Qinghai.
This view has been both contested and supported by different researchers
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