Panthera leo fossilis

Name: Panthera leo fossilis
Phonetic: Pan-fee-rah lee-oh foss-il-is.
Classification: Chordata,‭ ‬Mammalia,‭ ‬Carnivora,‭ ‬Felidae.
Species: P.‭ ‬leo fossilis.
Diet: Carnivore.
Size: 2.4‭ ‬meters long.
Known locations: Eurasia.
Time period: Pleistocene.
Fossil representation: Several specimens.

       Panthera leo fossilis was one of the first big cats that would later become dubbed‭ ‘‬cave lions‭’ ‬in the popular media.‭ ‬Panthera leo fossilis itself is considered to have been the ancestor to the more common though slighter smaller Panthera leo spelaea,‭ ‬better known as the Eurasian cave lion.‭ ‬Interestingly though a population of Panthera leo spelaea would become isolated in North America to become known as Panthera leo atrox,‭ ‬popularly known as the American lion or American cave lion,‭ ‬which would actually go on to grow slightly bigger than Panthera leo fossilis.‭ ‬This indicates that lion upper size is more down to‭ ‬predatory requirements and‭ ‬the ecosystems ability to support the body mass with viable prey,‭ ‬as opposed to a single linear direction of increasing or decreasing size.
       Descendants of Panthera leo fossilis seem to have been most suited to living in forested conditions where there was a greater abundance to prey like deer from huge species of Megaloceros to reindeer that still live today.‭ ‬It’s possible that Panthera leo fossilis may have shown similar niche partitioning as these animals‭ ‬would‭ ‬be close to the prey of their African cousins.‭ ‬Additionally the more open expanses of Eurasia during the Pleistocene were home to other fearsome predators like Homotherium and cave hyena that seemed to hunt in groups for large prey like woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos like Coelodonta.‭ ‬With predator competition so fierce in these areas,‭ ‬Panthera leo fossilis would have had an easier time living in the more overgrown forested where it only had to contend with wolves.‭ ‬Panthera leo fossilis is also considered to have been a hunter of early hominids,‭ ‬as evidenced by the presence of a Homo erectus jawbone found in association with a Panthera leo fossilis skull.
       Like with many early species of cave lion,‭ ‬there is on-going debate as to whether Panthera leo fossilis should be treated as a sub species of Panthera leo‭ (‬the modern day African lion‭) ‬or be granted its own distinct species group to be called just Panthera fossilis.‭ ‬While the sub species definition seems to be the one that holds the most sway today,‭ ‬research into both theories is still periodically done.

Further reading
- Two forms of cave lion: Middle Pleistocene Panthera spelaea fossilis Reichenau, 1906 and Upper Pleistocene Panthera spelaea spelaea Goldfuss, 1810 from the B�snik Cave, Poland - Adrian Marciszak & Krzysztof Stefaniak - 2010.
- The hunted hunter: the capture of a lion (Panthera leo fossilis) at the Gran Dolina site, Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain - Journal of Archaeological Science Volume 37, Issue 8 - Ruth Blasco, Jordi Rosella, Juan Luis ArsuagaJos� M. Berm�dez de Castrod, Eudald Carbonell - 2010.
- The first Asian record of Panthera (Leo) fossilis (von Reichenau, 1906) (Mammalia, Carnivora, Felidae) in the Early Pleistocene of Western Siberia, Russia. - Marina V. Sotnikova & Irina V. Foronova - 2013.
- First Asian record of Panthera (Leo) fossilis (Mammalia, Carnivora, Felidae) in the Early Pleistocene of Western Siberia, Russia. - Integrative Zoology. 9 (4): 517–530. - M. V. Sotnikova & I. V. Foronova - 2014.
- Panthera fossilis (Reichenau, 1906) (Felidae, Carnivora) from Za H�jovnou Cave (Moravia, The Czech Republic): A Fossil Record from 1987-2007. - Acta Musei Nationalis Pragae, Series B, Historia Naturalis. 70 (1–2): 59–70. - M. Sabol - 2014.
- Early Pleistocene origin and extensive intra-species diversity of the extinct cave lion. - Scientific Reports. 10: 12621. - David W. G. Stanton, Federica Alberti, Valery Plotnikov, Semyon Androsov, Semyon Grigoriev, Sergey Fedorov, Pavel Kosintsev, Doris Nagel, Sergey Vartanyan, Ian Barnes, Ross Barnett, Erik Ersmark, Doris D�ppes, Mietje Germonpr�, Michael Hofreiter, Wilfried Rosendahl, Pontus Skoglund & Love Dal�n - 2020.
- The evolutionary history of extinct and living lions. - PNAS. 117 (20): 10927–10934. - Marc de Manuel, Ross Barnett, Marcela Sandoval-Velasco, Nobuyuki Yamaguchi, Filipe Garrett Vieira, M. Lisandra Zepeda Mendoza, Shiping Liu, Michael D. Martin, Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding, Sarah S. T. Mak, Christian Car�e, Shanlin Liu, Chunxue Guo, Jiao Zheng, Grant Zazula, Gennady Baryshnikov, Eduardo Eizirik, Klaus-Peter Koepfli, Warren E. Johnson, Agostinho Antunes, Thomas Sicheritz-Ponten, Shyam Gopalakrishnan, Greger Larson, Huanming Yang, Stephen J. O’Brien, Anders J. Hansen, Guojie Zhang, Tomas Marques-Bonet & M. Thomas P. Gilbert - 2020.

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