Cape lion (Panthera leo melanochaita / melanochaitus)

[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 the Cape lion of modern South Africa, which was the type specimen for the Southern subspecies of lions in Southern and Eastern Africa, which were given the trinomen Panthera leo melanochaita by the Cat Specialist Group in 2017, 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.

Credit: Pocock, 1939
   
   
   

The Cape Colony (Dutch: Kaapkolonie) was a British colony in what is now South Africa, named after the Cape of Good Hope. The British colony was preceded by an earlier Dutch colony of the same name, the Kaap de Goede Hoop, established in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company. The Cape was under Dutch rule from 1652 to 1795 and again from 1803 to 1806. The Dutch lost the colony to Great Britain following the 1795 Battle of Muizenberg, but had it returned following the 1802 Peace of Amiens. It was re-occupied by the UK following the Battle of Blaauwberg in 1806, and British possession affirmed with the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814. The Cape of Good Hope then remained in the British Empire, becoming self-governing in 1872, and uniting with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. It then was renamed the Province of the Cape of Good Hope. Following the 1994 creation of the present-day South African provinces, the Cape Province was partitioned into the Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, and Western Cape, with smaller parts in North West province.

Map of the Cape Colony by John George Bartholomew in 1885: https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/histo...a_1885.jpg
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