From John Sanders, Bridport, Dorset, UK
Nick Blackstock reports seeing black leopards in Kenya in 1956 (Letters, 30 March). I worked in that country during the early 1960s with Gurner van Someren, a member of a noted East African family of naturalists, who in the 1940s sought to prove that black leopards were a separate species. In his role as a malaria officer, he had contacts with hunters, from whom he tried to buy leopard skins – provided they came with the skull to show anatomical differences. He was offered many pelts, but no skulls and hence no proof of a new species.
