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The size of the Barbary lion
The size of the Barbary lion
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The size of the Barbary lion
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Great call. Sorry to derail the thread. One last thing about canine length. Bengals technically are recorded as killing the largest prey ever recorded for a individual big cat so obviously they need extremely large weapons and massive muscles, maybe a siberians canines are slightly longer because of the area it lives. It is hunting prey that must have extremely dense and thick fur (bears, boars, elk, moose etc....) as well as carry more fat. Maybe they need these longer canines to puncture the vital spots on these thick blubbered and furred animals.
Sorry for the derailment.. 
Don´t worry my friend. I have wanted to create a topic specifically to show the differences and equalities between the Bengal and the Amur tigers.
I am very sure that topic will attract many people not only to the topic, but to the forum itself. In the future, I will make topics about this: "lion vs lion" and "tiger vs tiger" in the subspecies level. That will keep the attention of the popular posters and at the same time, will COMPLETELY AVOID the idiocy of the lion vs tiger theme. Wait for an hour, I going to create the new topic right away. [img]images/smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]
Here is an image, with an available scale bar (5 cm), of the London Tower lion skulls:
 *This image is copyright of its original author The largest of the two skulls is the whitish one, and the scale shows that this "large" skull measured only 305 mm in length. Again, not an exceptional specimen; the darkest skull is even smaller. 
I hope they could re-introduce the Asian lions back to its pre-historical/historical natural habitat in Europe/North Africa/West Asia/Central-West Africa.
It seems the only to reintroduce any animal is with extreme help from the gov't, which is sad but necessary at a time where the almighty $ takes precedent over the well being of any species. So until these animals don't need to be protected by us from us, they are fighting what seems to be a losing battle, unfortunately.
(04-22-2014, 03:42 AM)'GrizzlyClaws' Wrote: I hope they could re-introduce the Asian lions back to its pre-historical/historical natural habitat in Europe/North Africa/West Asia/Central-West Africa.The habitat has changed a lot since the last century. Most of the ancient wild areas are full of humans and they will not share anything, especially to a large predator like the lion. About the reintroduction in Europe, that is practically impossible. There are no longer wild areas in Europe that can sustain a large hyper-carnivore like the lion. Greece, the only home of the true lion (Panthera leo) in Europe, is complete anthropomorphized, so there is no form to introduce a lion in this place. West Asia is a very problematic area, specially by the ultra-religious groups of Muslims. If they are killing each other, don't you think that they will not even think twice in killing a lion? West Asia is out of question, in fact, check that the presented reintroduction programs of tigers in the Caucasus ignore Iran and Afghanistan. The north of Africa is willing to create habitats to reintroduce wild lions, at least from the point of view of the government. I think they will allow it because, like the lions in India, it will be a good political and touristic incentive to the area. They will have the monopoly of the last wild lions in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the few remnant populations of lions in West and Central Africa still exist in the wild with relative good habitat, they need to be protected, and here there is no point of discussion. At the end, it will be possible to reconstruct the lion range in the Atlantic-Mediterranean region, but there is not possible to restore them in Europe and the Middle East of Asia.
The body size of the Barbary lion and the west African lion (Panthera leo leo):
Finally, I have finished the comparison images of the size of all the lion subspecies/populations.This is the last one and shows the African remnant of the once greatly expanded Asian lion, which lived in Indian, all middle east, the north of Africa and the entire Atlantic coast of the west of Africa. Check it out:  *This image is copyright of its original author The body measurements of the West African lions came from scientific sources only, as I don't found any hunting record of the area. The shoulder height is not the standing height, based in images of the measurements. There is no data about the head-body, so I estimate it at 180 and 155 cm for males and females respectively, based in one single male specimen. For the Barbary lion, like this entire topic show, there are just two reliable figures of sizes (both from Brehm) and although is sure that they came from animals "in the flesh", he don't state if they were captive or wild, although in his book he quotes only wild lions. I add the skull sizes reported by Dr J. H. Mazák in order to provide more data. Finally, I add the weight of 243 kg provided by @Kingtheropod, primary because I found the original source and it seems reliable, at least more reliable that the weight of 255 kg for a male Indian lion of 1620! Take in count that the Barbary lion image represent the largest specimen, not the normal average of the other images. These because I don't have enough data, so I choose to show the possible largest specimen. The longest skull known is one of c.360 mm, according with Mazák (1970; attached document) and quoted by Yamaguchi and Haddane (2002), however based in the average presented by J. H. Mazák (2010), it seems that he found a larger one of at least 410 mm, large indeed but still in the range of the other African populations. Now, some hard-core fans will hate me for this image, as it proves that the large size of the Barbary lion is just a myth, however I invite them to read the REAL sources (actually read them), the original documents and sources, and you will see that there is not a single evidence or reliable data that these lions were any larger than any other population. In fact, the mane create the effect of "hugeness", but the mane is completely unrelated with the subspecies and is dominated by the climate. For that reasons, all those large captive lions with huge manes are NOT Barbary ones, but just a soup of genes of "American lions" like the also large "American tigers" in private facilities, take in count that these lions came from cold climates (large mane) and been captive are often fat and consequently "large" at the eye. Why I mention all this, well, because when I was searching a decent image of a maned lion to create the "Barbary" specimen for my image, I had the read all the disgusting posts of some hard-core fans in other forums stating that those large captive maned lions were "Barbary". For that reason, I know that this comparative image will be criticized by this sick people that stick with the old ideas instead of accepting the new data. In my next post I will show why the only TWO reports of large sized Barbary lions are unreliable and biologically impossible.
Hopefully they could discover some Holocene Asian lion subfossils in Europe.
That is a good point @GrizzlyClaws. Some people believe that the European lion (real modern lions, Panthera leo) were the key between the Barbary and the Indian lions. This idea was first proposed by Mazák (1970; attached file).
However, there is no evidence of the real size of those lions. Some old Greek descriptions present them as large and savage, but these are more allegoric descriptions than real observations. The few descriptions and comparative images of lions in the middle east show lions of relative smaller sizes, closer to those of India in modern times. Taking in count that the west African lions and the Indian lions are of the same size/weight and that those of Persia seems equal, it is safe to suggest that the Barbary and the Greek lions were also of the same size, with some exceptional specimens reaching about 250 kg, like all the other African lions, showing again that these lions were not exceptional at all.
This is an image with the only two sizes reported for the Barbary lion in literature:
 *This image is copyright of its original author The image is self-explained, and we can see how ridiculous are those sizes. However, I guess that Pease (1915) made a mistake and the head-body length that he quotes, was in fact, a total length. In this form, the figures match very well: Total length 250 cm, tail 75 cm (head-body 175 cm) and shoulder height of 95 cm. Here is the description from Gérard (1856), you can see that he just made a general description, not from a particular animal:  *This image is copyright of its original author Here is the description of Pease (1915), and you can see that he can't quote his source (maybe he forgot it) and this could be the source of his mistake:  *This image is copyright of its original author This data, and the previous reported by me in this topic, summarize all the data available about the size of the Barbary lion. I have wrote to Dr J. H. Mazák in order to know which was the size of the largest Barbary skull that he measure, let's hope that he could send me an answer (I estimate it at c.410 cm). Greetings.
I am quite interested about the Asian lion subspecies because it would be intriguing to see if they contain some leftover of the Cave lion's gene.
The last remnant population of the Cave lion was in the Caucasus, and they did overlap with the modern lions (Asian lions) for some thousands of years. It would be interesting if they truly did not interbreed with each other or vice versa.
According with the study of Barnett et al. (2009), modern lions never mix with the cave lions, there is no trace of genetic intermix and taking in count the time of separation, they could exclude themselves like different species. Remember that American lions (Panthera atrox) also never intermix with the Alaskan cave lions (Panthera spelaea), even when they are more closely related.
The lion was depicted by the Scythians (an ancient group of people living in the Eastern Europe during the Greco-Roman era) in their gold jewelry.
 *This image is copyright of its original author
Check this video of "true" Barbary lions in the famous Rabat Zoo:
Apart from the Indian lions, these are the most pure specimens of the subspecies. They look exactly like the old zoologists describe these animals. However, check they sizes:  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author It seems that if we dig in the issue, the result is that these lions had large heads but small bodies, similar with the East African lions. If someone could contact the Rabat Zoo, maybe they could share a few weights for comparison. |
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