Freak Felids - A Discussion of History's Largest Felines

[GuateGojira]

Morphological analysis shows that cave lions Panthera spelaea and modern lions Panthera leo are part of the same clad, together with the leopard and the jaguar, but separated from tigers. They have common traits but also they own different and particular characteristics. It is too early to start making assumptions about the true appearance of those cave lion cubs, as we don't have the full view of they bodies, we don't know if they have sposts, stripes or whatever they coat looks like. We most have caution with the color too, as mummified animals tend to loose some of it, even when some reddish color was found in some fur of a large specimen in Chukotka, even more, we most see that it is classified as a full species of its own, not a subspecies of modern lion (Kirillova et al., 2015).

Genetic analysis showed that there it was no genetic cross between cave lions and modern lions at all, nor in the middle east and certainly not in Asia (Cave lions lived in the north of Asia, while Indian-Persian lions lived in the south until Afghanistan and the north of India). This is important, because it shows that in fact, these two species of "lions", cave and modern, do not shared the same area. Even humans and Neanderthals do crossed, but cave lions and modern lions don't.

Even further, Barnett et al. (2009) showed that the cave lion Panthera spelaea did not interbreed with the American lion Panthera atrox at all, showing that at some point in the middle to late Pleistocene, these two "lion-like" groups were already different and probably constituted something beyond that simple subspecies. We most understand that the concept of Taxa in fact support a deep separation, in this case even if they were lion-like, there are no more "lions" in the stricto sensu, as the modern Panthera leo has no relation, in modern days, with the cave lion. The difference seems as deep as is between humans and chimpanzees.

Finally, is a scientific fact that all the lions from Asia, the north of Africa (Barbary) and west of Africa are the same subspecies (Panthera leo leo) and obviously deeply related with those of East and Southern Africa, which constitute the other subspecies (Panthera leo melanochaita). This information has been in public domain, and is based in many studies. Even more, the last genetic study of Barnett and Yamaguchi (in 2014 I think), showed that Barbary and Indian lions are indistinguishable as constitute a single group. The classifications of animal "subspecies" based in how they look is a old practice from the past century and is completely unreliable. Reply