Wildcat, Felis silvestris Schreber, 1775

Fig. 10

In the course of this research it was possible to examine one adult stuffed specimen in the collections of the Palmyra Archaeological Museum (PAM), another in the house of the taxidermist Mohammed Al Salie in the village of Salamieh (which had been captured in the vicinity), and another which was on sale in a shop at Damascus airport, very likely captured in the surroundings in 1992. The occurrence of the wild cat in the protected desert area of Al talila, Tadmor (= Palmyra) was confirmed in 2001 by the results of a camera trapping campaign carried out by Serra et al. (2007).