Asiatic Lion - Data, Pictures & Videos

[BorneanTiger]

Going back to the topic of Asiatic lions that existed outside India, I noticed something interesting. As noted by The Iran Project (https://theiranproject.com/blog/2014/02/...to-persia/), Indian lions were on the verge of extinction in India in the early 1900s, but Iranian lions weren't extinct before the 1940s, meaning that lions were still around in Iran when their Indian relatives were on the verge of extinction. It is reported by some that the last Iranian lions were sighted in the 1940s (https://books.google.com/books?id=esV0hc...er&f=false), with the last living one seen in northwest of Dezful City in 1942 (Note that this book has a rare photo of a Caspian tiger's skin in Page 66: https://books.google.com/books?id=t2EZCS...&q&f=false), and that a dead lioness was found on the banks of the Karun River in Khuzestan Province, 1944 (http://www.academia.edu/31713932/Potts_-...b3015e.pdf ), but not all sources say that the Persian lion got extinct in the 1940s.

This document (https://www.researchgate.net/publication...on_in_Iran) says that the lion became extinct in Iran 56 years before 2016, which is 1960, and this book (https://books.google.ae/books?id=tGddDwA...0s&f=false) says that a lioness was killed in a cave in Fars Province in 1963, and her cubs taken as captives!

Either way, sadly, Iran didn't have its own equivalent of people like Lord Curzon (the role of the Nawab of Junagadh shouldn't be ignored) to save its lions and tigers, as noted by The Iran Project. Aside from that, I would like to remind that I have photos and a video of lions (dead or alive) from Iran and Pakistan:

1) Photo by Antoin Sevruguin in Iran, circa 1880: modified from http://collections.si.edu/search/results...cstype=all

*This image is copyright of its original author

2) Shirea the Persian lioness, brought to Dublin by King Edward VII in 1902 (Dublin Zoo would have Asiatic lions nowadays, but I don't think that any are of Iranian descent): https://www.museum.ie/The-Collections/Do...an-Lioness

*This image is copyright of its original author

3) As stated by Nowell and Jackson, page 39 (http://carnivoractionplans1.free.fr/wildcats.pdf), it is thought that the last lion of what is now Pakistan was shot near Kot Diji in 1810, but this is disputed, with a British Admiral accompanied by 2 witnesses claiming to have seen a large, maneless lion devour a goat near Quetta in 1935 (https://books.google.com/books?id=4eTaAA...sc=y&hl=en). Regardless, in what is now Pakistan, the lion was said by Kinnear to have occurred in the area of Bahawalpur (https://archive.org/stream/journalofbomb...Bahawalpur), and Bahawalpur has a zoo called "Sher Bagh" (Lion Garden) which is said to have the stuffed lion that was Pakistan's last, look at 6:12–37, it is incorrectly called a 'tiger', but we can see that it is a stuffed lion: 

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