Held in awe for centuries as the ultimate ‘king of the beasts’, this big cat eventually fell victim to its legendary status
Last seen…
Date: 1942
Location: Morocco
Biologists once thought that the Barbary lion went extinct in the 1920s. In 2012, however, a group of researchers from the UK, Algeria and Qatar proposed that small populations might still have been living undetected in Algeria and Morocco as much as 40 years later. The most recent record of the shooting of a Barbary lion dates from 1942, when a hunter claimed the life of one in the Tizi N’Tichka Pass on the route between Marrakesh and Ouarzazate.
With their power, grace and ferocity, lions fascinate us in ways that no other predators can. Therefore, it is hard to accept that we have probably killed off the most revered member of this family of big cats.
Technically a subspecies of extant lions, the Barbary lion, or Atlas lion, could once be found prowling across North Africa from the Atlas Mountains to the Mediterranean feeding on ungulates. Largely cut off by the Sahara Desert from lions roaming the savannahs to the south, it earned a reputation for being bigger than its southern relatives. Moreover, the males were said to have very impressive manes of thick, dark fur that reached from the shoulders to the belly.
History shows that the Barbary lion’s stature extended far beyond its ecological range. The Romans captured many of them for gladiatorial contests. In the Middle Ages, two lions from the British monarch�
