Central African lion
| Central African lion | |
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| Lions in Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo | |
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| Lions in Mefou National Park, Cameroon | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Carnivora |
| Suborder: | Feliformia |
| Family: | Felidae |
| Genus: | Panthera |
| Species: | P. leo |
| Subspecies: | P. l. leo |
| Trinomial name | |
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Panthera leo leo (Linnaeus, 1758) |
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| Synonyms | |
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formerly:
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formerly:
The Central African lion (Panthera leo leo) is a lion population in Central Africa. In this part of Africa, lions occur in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad and Democratic Republic of the Congo, but are regionally extinct in Gabon and Republic of the Congo.
Results of a phylogeographic study indicate that lion populations in the northern Central African range countries are genetically close to populations in North and West Africa, and India, whereas populations in southern Central African range countries are genetically close to those in Southern and East Africa. In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the IUCN Cat Specialist Group subsumed lion populations to two subspecies, namely P. l. leo and P. l. melanochaita.
The names Congo lion and Northeast Congo lion referred to a subpopulation in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the 20th century, several African lion specimens were described and proposed as subspecies:
In 1939, Glover Morrill Allen recognized Felis leo kamptzi, F. l. bleyenberghi and F. l. azandicus as valid taxa among ten lion subspecies. The British taxonomist Reginald Innes Pocock subordinated lions to the genus Panthera in 1930 when he wrote about Asiatic lion specimens in the zoological collection of the British Museum of Natural History. Three decades later, John Ellerman and Terence Morrison-Scott recognized only two lion subspecies in the Palearctic realm, namely the African (P. l. leo) and Asiatic lions (P. l. persica).
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