The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has officially declared the eastern cougar extinct, 79 years after the last one was reported in the wild in the United States.

The eastern cougar is a subspecies of the cougar, which includes the Florida panther and the western cougar. There are multiple subspecies, though exactly how many is debated among biologists. All are called by several names depending on the area, including puma, panther, mountain lion, catamount, cougar and painter.

The eastern cougar's historic range extended from Maine south to Georgia, west into eastern Missouri and eastern Illinois, and north to Michigan and Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick, Canada.

Eastern cougars were killed off by European immigrants protecting both themselves and their livestock. States offered bounties to encourage killing them. The last official records of eastern cougars are believed to be in Maine in 1938 and New Brunswick in Canada in 1932.

It's true that cougars are still sighted within the eastern cougar's historic range, but the Fish and Wildlife Service has confirmed that all of them are either western cougars or cougars from South America kept as pets and released into the wild, says Meagan Racey, with the Service's Hadley, Mass. office. It's known that western cougars are migrating towards the Midwest, Racey says.

The Service published an eastern cougar recovery plan in 1982 but the Service now wants to delist the subspecies, because it no longer exists.

While some had claimed that 'ghost cats' still lived in the cougars' historic range, extensive efforts by Fish and Wildlife found none left.

"Even small populations of cougars, such as those in Florida and North and South Dakota, leave substantial physical evidence (tracks, photographs, scat, hair, genetic samples, road mortalities, cougars shot or caught in traps)," the agency said in a Q&A on its web site. "Service biologists assembled 108 records dating from 1900 to 2010 with a high level of confirmation that the described animals were cougars. After careful examination, the biologists concluded all reported cougars were animals that escaped or were released from captivity or that dispersed from the western United States."