North-East / Central / Equatorial African lions

[BorneanTiger]

(11-25-2019, 10:24 AM)Rishi Wrote:

(11-22-2019, 09:00 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: So confusing between the Barbary and Nubian lions is like confusing between the Amur and Bengal tigers, because just as the Barbary lion inhabited a temperate region of Africa (the region of the Atlas Mountains)...

Are you saying that based on actual genetic data? ...otherwise it's just speculation. Barbary lion's natural distribution extended fron Morocco to Sinai along coastal North Africa with sporadic presence in parts of northern Sahara as those areas got desertfied in last 5000 years.

We have tigers living in similar distances at semi-arid Rajasthan, snowy Bhutan & subtropical rainforest of NE India, all of the same subspecies, albeit with minor local variations.
On the other hand, climate or vegetation of the Sahara adjoining Red Sea & Mediterranean sea are very very similar, except for the thin strip on Nile's banks. Northwestern Libya has some costal areas with Mediterranean type vegetation, the rest of their habitat in Libya & Egypt were all same deserts.

Yes, just as genetic data shows that West African lions and a number of Central African lions aren't exactly the same as Barbary lions, even if they're more closely related to Barbary lions than to Southern lions (Panthera leo melanochaita) in southern parts of Africa, enough to be grouped by the Cat Specialist Group into one Northern subspecies (Panthera leo leo), like what they controversially did with subspecies of tigers (see this thread), genetic data shows that the Nubian lion of Northeast Africa isn't exactly the same as the Atlas lion of Northwest Africa.

As I mentioned in the first page of this thread, phylogeographic studies were done on Sudanese lion samples, including from Nubia. Barnett et al. used a vertebra from Nubia, and in terms of mtDNA, it grouped with skulls of Central African lions in the Central African Republic, and the northern part of Congo-Kinshasa (D. R. Congo), and that of an Ethiopian lion, but that it was less closely related to Northern (Barbary), Western, Eastern and Southern African lions, and lions in other parts of Central Africa: https://web.archive.org/web/200708081825...0lions.pdf
   
   
   

However, in another study by people including Barnett, a drilled bone from Sudan (not sure where in Sudan, and Alfred Edward Pease, who wrote extensively about lions in parts of Africa that he had been to, including Barbary and Northeast African lions, tells us much about where in Sudan they had been) was used, and in this case, the Sudanese lion was distinct from others, including a Northeast Congolese lion: https://www.researchgate.net/publication..._diversity Reply