Barbary or Atlas lions

[BorneanTiger]

As mentioned in the thread for the Asiatic lion, Reginald Innes Pocock had published the book "The Fauna Of British India Including Ceylon And Burma Mammalia (Volume 1)", in which he talked about the Asiatic lion, as well as African lions to a lesser extent. In pages 218–220, he mentioned that Captain Smee thought that Gujarati or Indian lions differed from African lions by their smaller manes. Pocock reckoned that Captain Smee's conception of African lions having bigger manes was probably due to specimens kept at European menageries (which can have thicker manes than wild lions), or due to the heavy manes of Barbary lions from Algeria or Cape lions from what was the Cape Colony, which had often been exported to Europe for exhibition in the early part of the 19th century. This thread is dedicated to Like how the Barbary lion of the Maghreb (Northwest Africa) was the type specimen for the Northern subspecies of lions in northern parts of Africa and Eurasia (particularly India), which was given the trinomen Panthera leo leo by the Cat Specialist Group in 2017, the Cape lion of modern South Africa was the type specimen for the Southern subspecies of lions in Southern and Eastern Africa, which were given the trinomen Panthera leo melanochaita, more details here: https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-cape-li...#pid111709 Reply