In July 2025, Scott Whitehead, a man who described himself as an "animal expert" in his social media bios, posted a video of a pair of mountain lions, also called cougars or pumas, walking in the snow. According to Whitestone, the mountain lions were "mysteriously migrating south from Yellowstone to Utah."
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Many people took Whitehead's claim seriously. Searches about mountain lions leaving Yellowstone National Park started trending on Google, and an X account with more than 1 million followers reposted (archived) it.
However, this was not a video of Yellowstone mountain lions migrating south to Utah. There was no evidence that the park's small mountain lion population was "mysteriously" leaving the area, either.
The video first appeared online (archived) on May 22, 2025, when a Chilean photographer shared it to Instagram. In the caption, the photographer wrote in Spanish that the video was recorded in Torres del Paine, a national park full of glaciers and mountains in southern Chile. That same account posted other photos and videos of mountain lions from the same region in May and June 2025.
There are mountain lions in Yellowstone, however; the National Park Service
Mountain lions anywhere do migrate and move around. About 99% of young male mountain lions disperse 50 to 400 miles from the place of their birth at about a year and a half old, according to the NPS webpage. Even within Yellowstone, cougars follow their main prey from the higher elevations in the summer to the lower elevations in the winter.
A Google search for "mountain lions leaving Yellowstone" found no mainstream news sources reporting on the apparent migration, even though such publications would surely report on such unusual behavior. Most of the search results were social media posts, fact-checks and sites that cited Whitehead as their source.
Whitestone posted a video with a similar claim about grizzly bears, also in July 2025. Snopes found that the video he was speaking over was miscaptioned, similar to the mountain lion video.