Sri Lanka Lion
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Prehistoric
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| Panthera leo sinhaleyus Deraniyagala, 1939 |
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Leo leo sinhaleyus |
The Sri Lanka lion or Ceylon lion Panthera leo sinhaleyus was a prehistoric subspecies of lion, endemic to Sri Lanka. It appears to have become extinct prior to the arrival of culturally modern humans, ca. 37.000 years BP.
This lion is only known from two teeth found in depostits at Kuruwita. Based on these teeth, P. Deraniyagala erected in 1939 this subspecies. However there is insufficient information to determine how it might differ from other subspecies of lion. Deraniyagala did not explain explicitly how he diagnosed the holotype of this subspecies as belonging to a lion, though he justified its allocation to a distinct subspecies of lion by its being "narrower and more elongate" than those of recent lions in the British Natural History Museum collection.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Kelum Manamendra-Arachchi, Rohan Pethiyagoda, Rajith Dissanayake, Madhava Meegaskumbura. 2005. A second extinct big cat from the late Quaternary of Sri Lanka. The Raffles Bulletin of Zoology. Supplement No. 12: 423–434. National University of Singapore. Online pfd
