Claire Throp - Lions

A lions tail can be 3 feet (1 meter) long! The tail has a tuft of longer hair onthe tip that is usually darker than the rest of a lions fur.

Classification is the way that humans try to make sense of the natural world. Groupingliving things together by the characteristics that they share allows us to identifythem and understand why they live where they do and behave how they do.

In classification, animals are split into various groups. The standard groups areKingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Sometimes, further classificationinvolves adding more groups such as a sub-order or infra-order. Each of the standardgroups contains fewer and fewer members. For example, there are far more animalsto be found in the class Mammalia (mammals) as animals in the family Felidae (cats).Animals are given an internationally recognized two-part Latin name. This helps toavoid confusion if animals are known by different common names in different countries.The lions Latin name is Panthera leo , for example.

This diagram shows how the lion is classified.

Lions are divided into African ( Panthera leo leo ) and Asiatic ( Panthera leo persica )subspecies. These two subspecies separated about 100,000 years ago. Some scientiststhink that African lions can be split into five subspecies based on where they live.However, this is not universally agreed. There are some visual differences betweenlions in the different regions. Lions in West and Central Africa are smaller, havesmaller manes, and may have different shaped skulls than lions that live in Eastand southern Africa. Asiatic lions are generally smaller than the African subspeciesand have smaller, darker manes.

While the first cat-like mammals appeared 60 million years ago, it is thought thatthe first true cats appeared about 25 million years ago. One was Proailurus, meaningearly cat, which was an animal the size of a large domestic cat. The family Felidaeincludes modern wild cats such as lions and other big cats as well as domestic cats.Members of this family are called felids.

This feline family tree shows estimated dates of when new lines evolved .

In the past, other subspecies of lion existed such as the Barbary and Cape lions,but they are now extinct in the wild. However, there are thought to be some Barbarylions held in captivity and the possibility of other extinct subspecies held somewherein captivity.