The size of the Barbary lion

[BorneanTiger]

(05-13-2019, 10:07 PM)GuateGojira Wrote:

(04-28-2019, 03:27 PM)BorneanTiger Wrote: Parc Sindibad's website: http://parcsindibad.ma/afrique-sauvage/ 

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This is a beautifull image of a captive Barbary lion in Morocco. I love this picture and altough I will like to use it for comparisons we lack the view of the paws. Maybe we can reconstruct it with other lion paws.

About the genetic, it is known now that captive lions from Morocco had Barbary genes from the father side but also they have Central African lion genes from the mother side, so stricto sensu there are not "pure" Barbary lions. However using the new subspecies studies, the lions from Central/West/North Africa and Asia are the same subspecies Panthera leo leo, so in latu sensu they are "pure" lions and can be used for conservation, which is good.

Interestingly if we want to be strict with the purity there is an study that states that Indian lions are closer to the original steam and are more "pure" genetically speaking, which suggest that Indian lions are more "Barbary" than those from Morocco, but that is irrelevant under the new subspecies clasification of the Cat Specialist Group.

Actually, as I highlighted here (https://wildfact.com/forum/topic-north-e...5#pid66275), not all Central African lions are of the Northern subspecies (Panthera leo leo), with others being of the Southern subspecies (Panthera leo melanochaita), so do you know exactly which Central African lion genes are present in these Sindibad lions on the maternal side?

Bertola et al.: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep3080..._evolution
 

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

As for that lion which was first spotted in Batéké Plateau National Park in the Central African country of Gabon in 2015 (https://psmag.com/environment/the-forest-lion-of-gabon), it was determined by Barnett et al. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.100...017-1039-2) to be related to Southern African lions in Botswana or Namibia, and specimens from Franceville and Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the neighbouring Republic of Congo (a.k.a. Congo-Brazzaville, not to be confused with D. R. Congo, a.k.a. Congo-Kinshasa) were 99.9 % genetically similar to those of Batéké lions, differing by only 1 mutation (like the relationship between Caspian and Amur tigers), meaning that these lions in the Central African countries of Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville are likely of Southern African (Panthera leo melanochaita) origin, which is a further complication for the CSG, because they classified lions in Central Africa as belonging to the northern subspecies (Panthera leo leo, Pages 71−73: https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/32616/A_revised_Felidae_Taxonomy_CatNews.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) 

The Gabonese lion: https://psmag.com/environment/the-forest-lion-of-gabon 

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