Barbary lion

The cultural significance of North Africa’s lions

Lions already played a role in early Egyptian art and literature. Archaeologists, for example, found statues and statuettes of lions from Egypt’s Early Dynastic Period (3100 to 2686 BC) in Hierakonpolis, the religious and political centre of Upper Egypt, and in the former Egyptian city of Koptos. The goddess Mehit from Egyptian mythology was depicted in the Early Dynastic Period as a resting lioness and later as a lion-headed woman, and Sekhmet was a lioness-shaped goddess in the mythology of Ancient Egypt. Amulets and figures with lion heads were also found in graves on the Aegean islands of Crete, Euboea, Rhodes, Paros and Chios.

There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians kept lions in captivity. In 2001, archaeologists discovered the skeleton of a mummified lion in the rock-cut tomb of Maia, the wet nurse of the ancient Egyptian king Tutankhamun, in the Saqqara necropolis. The find was the first complete lion skeleton discovered in Egypt. The archaeozoologist Cécile Callou studied the animal of unknown geographic origin in more detail and published her results in 2011 in the journal Anthropozoologica: The lion must once have lived for many years in captivity under poor conditions. It probably suffered from malnutrition, as its teeth were broken and show signs of chronic inflammation. Furthermore, fractures of some ribs and thoracic vertebrae indicate that the animal must have suffered at least one fall.

But it was not only among the ancient Egyptians that lions held a special status: the Romans also captured the animals—usually in North Africa—by the thousands for their venationes (beast hunts). David Day writes in 1981 in the Doomsday Book of Animals: “Both Julius Caesar and Pompey were known to have shown hundreds of these big cats at a time.” In Roman arenas, alongside gladiator fights, fights between exotic animals were among the great attractions of popular entertainment. For example, the Barbary lion and the also extinct Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata) were pitted against each other in fights. Venationes, in which animals died in their masses and which demonstrably also contributed to the extinction of some species, continued until the 6th century.

Barbary lion – fact sheet

alternative names	North African lion, Berber lion, Atlas lion, Egyptian lion
scientific names	Panthera leo leo, Panthera leo, Panthera leo nubicus, Panthera leo barbarica, Felis leo barbaricus, Felis leo nubicus, Felis leo leo, Felis leo
native range	Algeria, Morocco, formerly all of North Africa
time of extinction	1960s
causes of extinction	hunting, habitat loss, loss of prey animals

When and why did the Barbary lion go extinct?

Fights in Roman arenas cannot, of course, be seen as the sole cause of the disappearance of the Barbary lion. In historical times, the Barbary lion occurred across all of North Africa; only with the beginning of the 18th century did it disappear from the northeast of the continent and persist only in the northwest. Populations in western North Africa also kept shrinking. David Day names the reasons:

“Like the Atlas bear’s, the Barbary lion’s territory was once all of forested North Africa, but human destruction of that habitat and the spreading of the desert, combined with continuous hunting, resulted in a 2,000 year retreat; culminating in a confrontation with European guns, and extinction.”

The Doomsday Book of Animals, 1981, D. Day

The Barbary lion’s last refuge was identical to that of the Atlas bears: the rugged forests of the Middle and High Atlas Mountains. According to David Day, these were the wildest and least developed regions of North Africa well into the 20th century. In Great and Small Game of Africa (1899), the British African explorer Harry Johnston writes about the disappearance of the Barbary lions:

“What has brought about the extinction of this animal is less the persistent attacks of French or Arab sportsmen than the opening up of the forests and the settling down of the people since the French occupation. The herds are now so carefully tended that the lion has little or no chance of feeding on them, while the Barbary stag and the gazelles have in that region become very scarce.”

Great and Small Game of Africa, 1899, H. A. Bryden

With the French occupation of Algeria from 1830 onwards, it became a kind of pastime for the colonial military to shoot hoofed animals by the herd, which also primarily led to the extinction of the bubal hartebeest in the first half of the 20th century. For the Barbary lions, the hunting of Barbary stag (Cervus elaphus barbarus) and other ungulates meant that their food supply was restricted. It is known that Barbary lions hunted bubal hartebeest as well as wild boar and Barbary stag.

Most sources, such as Igor Akimuschkin in Vom Aussterben bedroht? (1972), state that the last Barbary lion was shot in Algeria in 1893 or that it was shot by a poacher in 1920 (or 1922) in the Moroccan part of the Atlas Mountains. A 2013 study by the University of Kent in England, however, shows that the Barbary lion probably survived much longer than assumed. There is evidence that the North African lion still occurred in 1942 in the Moroccan part of the Atlas Mountains, and some individuals are said to have lived into the 1940s in Morocco and western Algeria. Even in more recent times, Barbary lions may still have persisted in eastern Algeria. They disappeared, however, during the military conflict in Algeria between 1958 and 1962, when the last mountain forests near the coast—which had served as military hideouts—were systematically destroyed by arson attacks. The scientists of the study suspect that, in small populations and remote regions, the Barbary lion may have survived into the 1960s.

A popular zoo and circus animal

In the 18th and 19th centuries and at the beginning of the 20th century, Barbary lions were often captured as cubs and brought to Europe, where they were kept as circus animals or in zoos; for example, at the end of the 19th century in the London Zoo. But lions had already been kept in England in the Middle Ages: from 1235 to 1835, the menagerie in the Tower of London housed exotic wild animals, mainly big cats and bears.

For a 2008 study, researchers examined two well-preserved lion skulls that were excavated in the Tower of London between 1936 and 1937. Using radiocarbon dating, they dated the skulls to the 13th or 14th century and the 15th century respectively—making them the earliest confirmed lion remains on the British Isles since the extinction of the cave lion (Panthera spelaea) in the Pleistocene. In addition, DNA analyses and measurements of the skulls showed that the lions from the Tower of London originally came from North Africa, meaning they must have been Barbary lions.

The lions kept in the Tower of London were transferred in 1835 to the newly built London Zoo on the orders of Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, as it offered better keeping conditions. Authors of various contemporary accounts criticised the conditions under which wild animals were kept. The French zoologists Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier, for example, noted in 1824 in Histoire Naturelle des Mammiferes that the keeping conditions for big cats in menageries had been very poor . And in 1899, the English naturalist Charles John Cornish wrote in Life at the Zoo that, in the mid-19th century, lions at the London Zoo survived in captivity for an average of only two years.

The Barbary lion, the Cape lion and the Caspian tiger are not the only big cats to have vanished in historical times. The Bali tiger, the eastern puma or the Taiwanese clouded leopard are also considered extinct today.

Barbary lions were larger than other lions—fact or fiction?

Barbary lions are commonly regarded as the largest lions that existed in modern times. To test this thesis, the Malaysian zoologist Nobuyuki Yamaguchi in The North African Barbary Lion and the Atlas Lion Project (2002) looks at historical records concerned with the size of these big cats. He is surprised by how little evidence there is to prove that Barbary lions were “giant animals”.

Today we know that male lions living in Africa reach a body length of around 270 centimetres up to the tip of the tail and an average weight of 185 kilograms, with some individuals weighing more than 200 kilograms. For their Histoire Naturelle des Mammiferes, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier measured a six-year-old male Barbary lion raised in captivity. They found a total length of just under 224 centimetres including the tail, which is quite small for a male lion. Yamaguchi cautions, however, that it is unclear whether Barbary lions could reach their full size in captivity at all.

The French explorer and hunter Jules Gérard describes in 1856 in The Adventures of Gerard, the Lion Killer the measurements of a wild male Barbary lion: a body length of 230 centimetres, a tail 90 centimetres long, and a weight of 270 to 300 kilograms. If these figures are correct, the Barbary lion would indeed have been larger than other lions; Yamaguchi, however, doubts their accuracy, because Gérard could only make rough estimates in the open. Furthermore, Gérard—who in the mid-19th century enjoyed a reputation as an “intrepid lion-killer” and liked to report on his hunting ventures—may have tended to exaggerate, making him a not very reliable source.

Because Yamaguchi finds no meaningful evidence about the size of wild animals in the literature written during the lifetime of the Barbary lions, he additionally measures Barbary lion skulls and compares their size with those of other lion skulls. The largest skull measured by Yamaguchi was 36 centimetres long, which is not exactly small; however, skulls of present-day lions from the Sahara are readily 38 to 40 centimetres long. At present, fewer than ten skulls of adult Barbary lions are known from museums and collections. Yamaguchi therefore points out that this is too little to make reliable statements about whether Barbary lions were actually larger than other lions—but much suggests that they were not.

A particularly dense mane as a distinguishing feature

In their natural habitat, African and Asian lions living today normally do not have manes that extend behind their shoulders and run along the belly, as was the case with the Barbary lion. A pronounced, dense and dark mane is still very often associated with Barbary lions, although it is not a morphological trait that should be used to distinguish Barbary lions from other lions. The reason is that their impressive mane is merely an adaptation to the colder, temperate mountain climate. In zoos, it has been observed that lions develop more pronounced manes when they are exposed to a colder climate.

In a 2002 study, the biologists Peyton M. West and Craig Packer were able to scientifically demonstrate a strong positive correlation between mane size and cool temperatures. The researchers also state that the size and colour of the mane can additionally be influenced by other factors such as nutrition or physiological stress.

According to Yamaguchi, the fact that lions from North Africa were not necessarily depicted with particularly dense manes in Roman art could be due to the conditions under which lions were kept in Roman times having influenced mane growth. A dense mane is therefore not meaningful as a distinguishing criterion between Barbary lions and other lions. Male lions with dense manes kept in zoos in colder regions such as Europe, Russia or North America therefore do not necessarily carry Barbary lion blood.

Barbary lions: lion subspecies or population?

In a 2020 interview with DownToEarth, the British conservation scientist Simon Black notes that hardly anything is known about the genetics of the Barbary lions because there are only a few museum specimens in Europe and America. Morphological studies, however, suggest that Barbary lions had a more bulky body, shorter limbs, some differences in hip structure, and features otherwise found only in Indian lions, such as an abdominal fold and specific skull structures. Black considers it possible that not only the dense mane, but also some other morphological Barbary-lion traits are due to the colder climate.

The Barbary lion’s striking appearance led the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus to describe it scientifically in 1758 as Felis leo. In the past, scientists described numerous lion subspecies, with the Barbary lion being designated the nominate subspecies: modern natural history, for example, classifies Barbary lions, West African lions, Cape lions and Asiatic lions. The lions north of the Sahara were the Barbary lions.

The Cat Specialist Group of the IUCN reduced the number of lion subspecies originally identified by the zoologist W. Chris Wozencraft from eleven to two in the 2017 Revised Felidae Taxonomy. Based on genetic analyses in recent years, only two lion subspecies are currently distinguished: Panthera leo leo and Panthera leo melanochaita.

The subspecies Panthera leo leo includes the West African lions, the Central African lions north of the rainforest belt, the Indian lions and the extinct lions of North Africa, the Middle and Near East and the Balkans—thus also the Barbary lion. The subspecies Panthera leo melanochaita includes the lions from eastern and southern Africa, such as the exterminated Cape lion. For both the Cape lion and the Barbary lion, this means that they are not distinct lion subspecies but populations of Panthera leo leo and Panthera leo melanochaita respectively.

Almost 90 percent of all lions belong to the southern subspecies P. l. melanochaita. In North Africa, the more limited landscapes led to individual lion populations being more scattered, according to Simon Black. This made them less resilient to human impacts, ultimately causing their disappearance in the mid-20th century.

Barbary lions in today’s zoos

As the Barbary lion became increasingly rare in the wild, zoos soon no longer had any “true Barbary lions”, only crossbreeds with lions from other populations. An exception was the Rabat Zoo in Morocco’s capital; the lions there were considered direct descendants of the Barbary-lion populations of North Africa. The Moroccan king Hassan II, who ruled in 1970, gave the big cats—originally received by Moroccan princes from the North African Berber people as a pledge of loyalty—to the Rabat Zoo at the time.

Today’s lions at the Rabat Zoo trace back to King Hassan II’s Barbary lions and are direct descendants. Their appearance at least matches historical descriptions of the Barbary lion. In 1998, there were probably still 52 lions in the Rabat Zoo and in zoos in Europe that were descendants of Hassan II’s animals. In 2020, the number of individuals was around 90 lions. The Rabat Zoo and European zoos now focus on keeping and breeding only members of the “royal Barbary lion group” so that the bloodlines are preserved and not crossed with other zoo lions or with southern lions. In captivity, the Barbary-lion descendants are even kept separate from Asiatic lions, although these also belong to the northern lions.

A large number of zoos in Europe advertise breeding pure-bred Barbary lions, such as the Erlebnis-Zoo Hannover, the Zoo Neuwied, the Heidelberg Zoo, the Walter Zoo in Switzerland or the Zoo Pilsen in the Czech Republic. The (back-)breeding programmes for Barbary lions in wildlife parks are primarily about maintaining lions that are directly descended from King Hassan II’s Barbary lions and whose external characteristics match those of the North African big cats.