This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I'm Ashleigh Papp.Mountain lions are now posing for their close ups.Researchers based in the greater Yellowstone National Park area have figured out a new way to identify these cats by using facial recognition.And this method is proving to be a better way to monitor these highly elusive creatures.Mountain lions are just really, really hard to directly observe.They're just so cryptic and secretive.And so we've had to find these non-invasive methods, they're often called to, to get information about a mountain lion population.That’s Peter Alexander, a research biologist based in Kelly, Wyoming, who led the research project.One tool that researchers like Alexander are using is a camera trap.The traps, which are about the size of a shoe box or even a coffee cup, are attached to something that's along the animal's regular path, like a tree that the puma has territorially scraped.When motion is detected, the trap gets triggered, resulting in a snapshot of the mountain lion as it strolls by.The cameras even have an infrared flash so that nighttime photos are captured without disturbing the animal.Researchers around the world use this type of tool to estimate population numbers and overall abundance of species.They comb through the images, sometimes using machine learning algorithms, and analyze them to identify individuals.But according to Alexander, there's a problem with this method when it comes to ID'ing mountain lions: