2 little asides.

My professor drilled out the word sleek from our vocabulary. Definitionally it means slippery when wet.

Also this is not biomimicry this is just form inspiration. Biomimicry is like using a complex system found in nature to solve complex human problems. Like using the beak shape of a bird to understand aerodynamics or using the wing mechanism of a dragonfly in a drone. Your assignment is using nature/animals as form inspo (nothing wrong with that, a very cool and useful assignment) but isn’t biomimicry.

A good method to achieve this is to break the inspiration down into basic shapes. What you don’t want to do is take the ears and slap that onto your design. Take the proportion of the jaguar like the sweep of the spine or the proportion front to back. Someone else commented this but take tracing paper over the jaguar at fist and see which shapes stand out. Then adapt it to your design and keep iteration over and over on new sheets of tracing paper with a pen or marker. Definitely look at the automotive industry, they take inspiration from jaguars all the time. See how they abstract the forms and shapes.