Lion

A large, powerfully built cat of the family Felidae, and the second largest of the big cats (after the tiger), now found wild only in Africa south of the Sahara. A few hundred live in Gir Forest National Park in Gujarat state, India. It has been, since earliest times, one of the best known of wild animals. During the late Pleistocene Epoch (1,600,000 to 10,000 years ago), lions had an extremely wide geographic distribution and ranged over all of North America and Africa, most of the Balkans, and across Anatolia and the Middle East into India. They disappeared from North America about 10,000 years ago, from the Balkans about 2,000 years ago, and from Palestine during the Crusades. It is possible that the connection between the king and the lion stemmed from the hunting of these animals by the tribal chiefs of the Predynastic period in Egypt.

The lion, Panthera (Felis) leo is today restricted to the open savanna and plains of Africa south of the Sahara. Previously it inhabited much of Europe as well, and even in the 19th century its range covered most of Africa and large areas of southwestern Asia. Fossils of lion occur in European caves throughout much of the later Quaternary. Many of the animals represented by these fossils were much larger than the modern lion; some authors differentiate them as Panthera (Felis) spelaea.