Barbary or Atlas lions

[brotherbear]

The Barbary Lion.... planetearthscienceart.blogspot.com/2010/07/africas-only-bear-brief-natural-history.html


Friday, July 9, 2010
The Mystery of the Atlas Bear


In the region of Northwestern Africa known as the Maghreb, north of the Sahara Desert and high up in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, there are hidden an array of superb natural treasures with very unique and surprising history...

The climate of the Maghreb is varied but more or less parallels the natural conditions found on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea – a stark, rocky, and arid wilderness of high, dry plains, open, mixed woodlands, and alpine expanses. Remarkably, at the narrowest point in the Strait of Gibraltar, North Africa is separated from Spain by only 7.7 nautical miles of seawater (14.24 km). And thus, to no marginal extent –and perhaps expectedly- North Africa’s biological composition is characterized by an exceptional mixture of both African and European floras and faunas.


These mountains were once the haunt of the regal Barbary Lion (Panthera leo leo), a great cat of superlative splendor, which disappeared from the continent sometime during the course of the early to mid 20th century. A smaller pantherine counterpart of this region –the secretive Barbary Leopard (Panthera pardus panthera) - managed to cling precariously to existence for some decades longer than the lion, and has itself disappeared perhaps only within this last ten years or so. There is still some hope that these incredible cats lurk like ghosts in the far reaches of the mountains, but they have not been seen or otherwise detected for a number of years. Many naturalists have concluded that the Atlas Mountains are now absent of leopards and lions.

There was another animal in these mountains -seemingly out of place for its kind- which disappeared from northern African probably about one century before the lion and the leopard. The creature was unusual for several reasons, the first reason was that it was a bear –the only native kind naturally present on the vast African continent within recent history, and the second, that it may have in fact been a distinct species apart from the ones we are now familiar with. Reply