Cave lions

As an aside; those American lion pictures reminded me that some recent papers that have done DNA research on the fossils of various specimens (as well as morphological studies, which work together and come to the same conclusion) suggest that the "primitive cave lion", Eurasian (and Berengian) cave lion, and the American cave lion are all sufficiently distinct that they are unique species not only from each other but more to the point, from the lion itself.  In other words; they're not lions.  They are very big cats, like super-sized jaguars or like tigers, but they are not lions.  The tendency to depict them as looking like wintry, grayish lions is probably not correct (the largest concentration of American lion fossils comes from La Brea in southern California where, even during the Ice Age, the climate was mild and Mediterranean-like, although somewhat more wooded and less sere than it is today.)

Another interesting find; there's no indication that the American "lion" made it further south than northern Mexico after all, and habitat differences seem to have kept it from overlapping in territories where the jaguar was extant.  What were believed to have been lion fossils in South America are now reinterpreted as exceptionally large jaguars.

And, of course, Asiatic lions, which are today isolated to a tiny strip of land in a national park in India, were once widespread across much of Asia and even eastern/southern Europe.  They may have been well-known to the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and it's not for nothing that the Greeks had loads of legends about lions; they probably knew them in person.  (Of course, the Greeks weren't confined to Greece either.  Magna Grecia had colonies all along the Black Sea, the southern half of the Italian peninsula, parts of coastal France and the Iberian peninsula and north Africa, and they probably traded not a small amount with the Carthiginians, and others on the Levant, and Egypt.)  I do wonder, sometimes, if maybe the cave lion didn't survive in Europe longer than people think, though. Like the aurochs, maybe it's an "Ice Age" animal that survived until just barely before the advent of recorded history in the area.

What does all this mean?  I don't know if it really means anything much other than that paleoartists should be careful not to model Panthera atrox, spelaea and fossilis too closely on the lion, since they weren't lions.  And, of course, more to miss.  Someday, in Heaven, I expect to really deep dive prehistoric life and learn all kinds of things about it that we can't know today, since clearly I was born with a natural affinity for it.

UPDATE: I should point out that those conclusions I mentioned on Friday aren't necessarily universally accepted.  Although there is evidence that Panthera atrox never got to South America after all, there is other evidence that it did, including some cave art and some preserved skin from Patagonian locations.  This, if it is indeed what it seems to be, would suggest that the American lion was reddish in color.

The European lion, Panthera spelaea, which the American lion is supposed to be an isolated descendant population of, on the other hand, has tawny hair, but lighter than that of the extant lion, much as it is illustrated in the more modern illustrations I've shown so far, with a warm underfur, not unlike that of Arctic animals today.  Cave paintings in France and elsewhere suggest that it was pretty much mane-less, too—which may mean that it didn't exhibit pride behavior, since pride behavior and the mane go hand in hand; i.e., the mane is an adaptation that male lions have so that they can fight with each other for control of the prides.

On the other other hand, pride behavior and cooperative hunting is seen as highly advantageous on the open country that both leo, atrox and spelaea are believed to have inhabited.  Solitary ambush predators among the cats, like the tiger, the puma, the jaguar, the leopard, etc. take advantage of cover to approach their prey; cover which is considerably harder to come by in the savannas of Africa or Pleistocene North America, the pampas and Patagonian pampas and desert, or the mammoth steppes of northern Europe and Siberia and Berengia, etc.  Not saying it's impossible; the cheetah makes a living as a solitary hunter, although its approach is considerably different.  Or that cooperative hunting is limited to open country; wolves certainly prove that false.  But there is evidence to suggest that pride behavior and open country do go hand in hand at least with lions, and probably with derived relatives of leo like spelaea and atrox, if they inhabited similar country as leo, probably exhibited similar behavior too.