Panthera leo leo is the name the IUCN Cat Specialist Group used in 2017 for the northern lineage of lions: those of West and Central Africa and India, and formerly of North Africa, south-east Europe and south-west Asia.[1] It carries the name Linnaeus gave the whole species in 1758.[2]
Names and classification
In the 2005 list of 11 subspecies, leo meant only the lions of North Africa.[1] The 2017 checklist widened it to the whole northern lineage, and put the Barbary and Asiatic lions inside it.[1] Linnaeus gave the locality only as “Africa”, and a later author restricted it to the Barbary coast, more exactly Constantine in Algeria.[1] The checklist says that a way to tell the two subspecies apart by their bodies is not yet known.[1]
Range
The IUCN’s 2025 assessment lists P. l. leo as Endangered, and the lions of West Africa as Critically Endangered.[3] In West Africa an estimated 406 lions (273–605) survive in four of 21 protected areas surveyed. Their confirmed range of about 49,000 km² is 1.1% of the historical West African range.[4] In India the Asiatic Lion survives in and around the Gir Forest.[3]
Groups within it
The northern lineage includes the Asiatic Lion and the extinct Barbary Lion. Older lists also gave separate names to the lions of West Africa, Cameroon and north-east Congo. See the full list of subspecies names.
Classification evidence
Lions of West and Central Africa are closer to the Asiatic Lion than to the lions of East and Southern Africa.[5] A whole-genome study dates the split between the northern and southern lineages to about 70,000 years ago.[6] The groups of the northern lineage, from Central and West Africa to India, diverged about 50,000 years ago or less.[1] DNA from museum specimens shows that the extinct Barbary and Iranian lions belong to it.[7]
Sources
- Kitchener et al. 2017, A revised taxonomy of the Felidae, IUCN Cat Specialist Group
- GBIF backbone, Panthera leo
- Nicholson et al. 2025, IUCN Red List assessment of Panthera leo
- Henschel et al. 2014, PLOS ONE 9: e83500 (West African lions)
- Bertola et al. 2011, Journal of Biogeography 38
- de Manuel et al. 2020, PNAS (lion and cave lion genomes)
- Barnett et al. 2014, BMC Evolutionary Biology 14: 70