The Cave Lion (Panthera spelaea and Panthera fossilis)

[Ghari Sher]

Hello,
I'm an amateur enthusiast who's been enamoured by the lions of the Pleistocene ever since I first read about them, and I've found it hard to find many in-depth online discussions about them (this being on of the few). Great to find this forum, and there's quite a few new things I've learned from reading this thread.

Quite an interesting thing that Panthera fossilis has been suggested to not even be directly ancestral to spelaea - I wasn't aware of that.
But in regards to the hypothesis that atrox is derived directly from fossilis, with the being more distantly related to spelaea, there is a paper that comes to mind regarding this, Barnett's 2009 genetic study. It doesn't seem to have been mentioned in this discussion, but maybe I've missed it.
He used sequences from both Eurasian and North American Pleistocene lions and found that spelaea and atrox were actually very close:

*This image is copyright of its original author

He estimates that the two lineages diverged about 337,000 years ago (194,000-489,000 range), and evidence suggests atrox descended from a population of Beringian spelaea which entered North America and was subsequently isolated.


https://www.zin.ru/Labs/theriology/eng/s...l_2009.pdf

That split seems to be a bit too young for the hypothesis of atrox deriving directly from fossilis (though there is some temporal overlap in the ranges), and being more distant to spelaea. Reply