what made this track?

[Hoyt]

If I had to bet I'd say bobcat..just because it's more rounded.

way to melted out to make a positive id, but if i was to asume...i would asume it was a canine.
dog or coyote?

[JimB]

Here is a picture of a 50# lion kitten track
 
A female lion track
 
Front foot of a 154# male lion.
 

[Sharpster]

Well aren't we a sad bunch!   ... Expert  outdoorsmen and women and we can't tell if it's a dog or cat track!      

Ron

[LittleBen]

excerpt from Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey 'The eastern cougar was listed as endangered by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1973, although it was thought to have already been extinct as early as the 1930’s. In 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the species extinct. However, in June 2011, a 2-5 year old male cougar was struck and killed by a car in Connecticut. It is believed that this individual roamed over 1,500 miles from the Black Hills region of South Dakota based on DNA evidence. Big cats are very wide-ranging animals that can cover a great deal of distance in a relatively short amount of time as they search for prey, mates, or their own territory.'

Therefore likelyhood of cougar is as close to zero as you can get.

Linx are more northern, they rely on snowcover to overtake prey like rabbits etc.

As to bobcat vs canine, I think TRAP nailed it as well. The symmetry of the print says canine to me. The track is also not fresh so you can't necessarily expect to see claw marks. They could have filled in with light flurries or blowing snow, or melting could have merged them with the rest of the print.

As someone said, tracking is much easier when considering stride and depth of print than size alone. Size changes, track spacing doesn't. A big bobcat is a small coyote, my guess is this would shed light on the situation. Another easy one here is if it goes up a tree it s cat. If you follow the track for an hour and it never leaves the ground, I'd be thinking canince more and more.

[FarmerMarley]

This is exactly what I like about tracking. One track and 50 different interpretations...
It's good to realize substrate, conditions, etc can all affect a track and make Identification tricky. Even an expert tracker can be humbled and misidentify something.

The important thing is not to always be right about each track you see, but to always learn something from each track you see. And to be open to the possibility that you might be wrong and might need to revise your hypothesis when you find more information further down the trail.

[bamboo]

its a tough call --but the reason i lean towards cat of some kind of cat[probably bobcat]----is the rear of the center pad is three lobed and straight across and in the canine drawing the center lobe is also three lobed BUT.. depicted as decidedly foward--also the canine tracks tend to be longer and narrower
 http://www.bear-tracker.com/coyote.html
 http://www.bear-tracker.com/bobcat.html
thanks for the input guys and as farmer marley says the most important thing is to keep learning
my 9yr old is real interested in tracks so it was fun to be out and looking at a weeks worth of tracks in the snow

[nineworlds9]

The melt will skew the ID some.  Could be bobcat/lynx/canine.  I'd be surprised as heck if that was a cougar being west of the Mississippi like you are.

[dhermon85]

Neighbors dog using your yard again!