The lion shook his hair and stood upright, and Hu Teng danced softly. -(Tang) Yuan Zhen's Twelve Poems of Yuefu, Western Cool Poems, Li He's New Title of Collating Books.
The foxes are all on the screen, and the lion is excited about the golden retriever. -(Song) Interpretation of Xian Jie's Eleven Ancient Poems
The lion (scientific name: Panthera leo) is referred to as the lion for short, and was called the eldest sister-in-law in ancient China. This is a big cat that lives in Africa and Asia. It is the cat with the largest average weight in existence and the only male and female cat in the world.
Lions are big, even big, with long limbs and toes. The head is big and round, the snout is short, and the vision, hearing and smell are developed. Canine teeth and cracked teeth are extremely developed; The upper tooth has three tips, and the lower tooth has two tips. The molars degenerated, and the crown diameter was smaller than the height of lateral incisors. Soft fur. 5 toes on the front foot and 4 toes on the back foot; The claws are sharp and retractable. The tail is more developed. Known as the "king of grassland", it is the top cat carnivore in Africa. The average weight of wild African lions is 240 kilograms and the total length can reach 3.2 meters. Lions have short hair and are light gray, yellow or brown in color. Lions also have long manes, such as light brown, dark brown and black. The long mane extends to the shoulders and chest.
Living in savanna and grassland, it also appears in shrubs and dry forests. Carnivorous, often ambush and kill other warm-blooded animals. Distributed in African grasslands, Asia and India. The life span of lions in the wild is 10 to 14 years, and the life span in captivity is longer, generally more than 20 years.
The lion is a big cat. According to its evolutionary trajectory, scientists concluded that this species originated about1.20 thousand years ago. The latest achievement published in the British magazine BMC Evolutionary Biology was completed by researchers from Britain, America, France and Australia. They took samples from ancient lion specimens distributed in museums around the world, including extinct Babalj lions in North Africa and Iranian lions. The researchers sequenced their genes, and compared the sequencing results with the existing Asian lions and African lions, and obtained the evolutionary road map of modern lions.
The results show that lions originated in eastern and southern Africa about124,000 years ago, and only about 210,000 years ago did lions begin to walk out of Africa and reach India and other places in Asia as far as possible. In terms of branches, modern lions are mainly divided into one in eastern and southern Africa and one in central, western Africa and India. The latter is now on the verge of extinction, which means that lions are at risk of losing half of their genetic diversity.
In the past few decades, the number of lions living in central and western Africa has greatly decreased. This new study shows that this lion should be protected from the perspective of genetic diversity to maintain the survival and development of the entire lion population.