ON THE EDGE OF EXTINCTION - B - THE LION (Panthera leo)

[GuateGojira]

(09-09-2018, 09:04 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: So the East African lion is a lion to be reckoned with, even though Smuts et al. (https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wi....tb01433.x) said that the East African lions they measured were on average lighter than Southern African lions from Kruger National Park, the Kalahari region and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). It's like what I said before, records for lions may vary by subspecies or region, so we have to be careful when someone says that the record for a lion's skull, weight or height is such-and-such, because different people say different things. For example, Heller (https://archive.org/stream/smithsonianmi...5/mode/2up) claimed that the Cape lion of South Africa was 'distinctly' the biggest lion that he had come across, and that the skulls of Cape lions were at least an inch (25 mm) longer that those of "equatorial races" (the Equator goes through Eastern and Central Africa, and runs just south of Western Africa, so these lions would be Eastern, Central and Western African lions)

Actually, all the information available shows that East African lions are, in fact, smaller than those from Southern Africa, in weights and in skull length. 

The remark of Heller (1913) about the skulls is correct. A simple comparison between the East African lion skulls from Allen and Hollister with the skulls from South Africa in Roberts (1951) shows that the South African race is larger in all the departments. The two Ethiopian lions were captive specimens, in fact Heller fail to report that those lions were already captive before to transport them to USA, so the wide zygomatic arches are already affected by captivity.

I remember a skull from a Cape lion (which by the way, was only the southern population of the still living South Africa lion) measured by Mazák in this document "Notes on the Black-maned Lion of the Cape, Panthera Leo Melanochaita (Ch. H. Smith, 1842) and a Revised List of the Preserved Specimens" which he said it was the largest skull measured by him in that moment. Sadly the skull was broken, so based in the the available measurements and using other skulls as surrogates, he estimates a condylobasal length of near 355 mm for the Cape specimen B.M. 15.5.23.2. The CBL of the other 9 skulls from South Africa ranged from 327.8 to 350.5 m and GSL lengths from 379.3 to 396 mm; this means that the GSL of the Cape lion specimen was probably about 400 mm; it seems that this sizes are reached only in the Southern Africa region. 

Lions from West and Central Africa are the smallest in Africa and about the same size than the Indian lions. Reply