Barbary lion

Rare card · No. 26955

The Barbary lion was a population of the lion subspecies Panthera leo leo. It was also called North African lion, Atlas lion, and Egyptian lion. It inhabited the mountains and deserts of the Maghreb in North Africa, from Morocco to Egypt. A comprehensive review of hunting and sighting records revealed that small groups of lions may have survived in Algeria until the early 1960s, and in Morocco until the mid-1960s. Today, the wild population is extinct in this region. It was eradicated following the spread of firearms and bounties for shooting lions. Fossils of the Barbary lion dating back between 100,000 and 110,000 years were discovered in the Bizmoune cave near Essaouira. Until 2017, the Barbary lion was considered a distinct lion subspecies. Results of morphological and genetic analyses of lion samples from North Africa showed that the Barbary lion does not differ significantly from the Asiatic lion and falls into the same subclade. This North African-Asian subclade is closely related...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Photograph by Fernandus (formerly of Biskra, Algeria), published by Alfred Edward Pease (29 June 1857 – 27 April 1939), Public domain