Well I ran into Ron Andrews in Des Moines last weekend nad I asked him about this pic. He said that his first impression was that it was legit. But after he got to looking at it the thing looked like a housecat. So he sent it to a place out west that analyzes thes things and they came back conclusively that it was a housecat. Hard to argue with him. I asked him if the people who took the pics took any of the tracks and he said no but they actually had one more picture that looked even more like a cat that hadn't been made public.
For what it is worth, he said there have been three confimed kills of mountian lions in Iowa, all of which appeared to be wild. There have been over 1000 reported sightings and about 2% of them have been verified.