© ReutersThe lion was spotted in the New York City suburb of Greenwich a week ago
The 10 stone mountain lion was hit by a small SUV on a highway in Milford, Connecticut, early Saturday morning, and died from its injuries. The driver was unhurt, officials said.
With no native mountain lion population in the state, officials said it was "possible and even likely" it was the same enormous cat with a long tail spotted last weekend in the New York City suburb some 30 miles away, said Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Dennis Schain.
The large cat was transferred to a state environmental facility where authorities will use the photos, paw prints and other evidence collected near the three Greenwich sightings to determine if it is the same animal.
Travelling between the two US cities would be a jog for this large cat known to roam extensively, even up to a couple hundred miles in a day, said Schain.
The eastern mountain lion was officially declared extinct earlier this year, prompting authorities to suspect the animal spotted in the urban jungle of the New York City metropolitan area, had either escaped or was released from captivity.
The closest confirmed population of mountain lions is in Missouri, half way across the country.
Mountain lions, also known as a cougar or puma, are lone animals that in the east primarily preyed on white-tailed deer.
"By and large, cougars want to stay as far away from people as they possibly can because they are so solitary," said Bob Wilson, a co-founder of The Cougar Network, an organisation devoted to tracking and researching the animal.
Wilson said mountain lions like to hunt in the shadows and it would be a very remote chance to encounter the cat.
The eastern cougar was hunted and trapped "relentlessly" and gone from much of the region by the late 1800s, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Around the same time its habitat was destroyed by deforestation and the population of its prey declined.
extirpated not extinct. Moreover, mountain lion (P. concolor) sightings - many confirmed cases by state game authorities - have occurred much closer than Missouri in recent years: Michigan, Indian, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire have all had cat sightings within the past decade. Are they breeding populations? Maybe. Are these sightings of "mountain lion" by confused or ill-informed spotters actually bobcats or smaller species or truly escaped exotic specimens. No doubt this happens. The routine is for authorities to state they are escaped exotic pets when such reports are confirmed, usually by DNA evidence collected via hair samples, etc.. To admit wild breeders is to invite federal regulation at the cost of states, while at the same time inviting contentious wrangling between various advocacy campaigns and PACs.