Lion Picture and Encyclopedia

The Lion is one of four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger. Wild lions currently exist in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia with a critically endangered remnant population in Gir Forest National Park in India, having disappeared from North Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia in historic times. Until the late Pleistocene, which was about 10,000 years ago, the lion was the most widespread large land mammal after humans. They were found in most of Africa, much of Eurasia from western Europe to India, and in the Americas from the Yukon to Peru.


Distribution and habitat :
In Africa, lions can be found in savanna grasslands with scattered Acacia trees which serve as shade; their habitat in India is a mixture of dry savanna forest and very dry deciduous scrub forest. In relatively recent times the habitat of lions spanned the southern parts of Eurasia, ranging from Greece to India, and most of Africa except the central rainforest-zone and the Sahara desert. Herodotus reported that lions had been common in Greece around 480 BC; they attacked the baggage camels of the Persian king Xerxes on his march through the country. Aristotle considered them rare by 300 BC. By 100 AD they were extirpated. A population of the Asiatic Lion survived until the tenth century in the Caucasus, their last European outpost.
The species was eradicated from Palestine by the Middle Ages and from most of the rest of Asia after the arrival of readily available firearms in the eighteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they became extinct in North Africa and the Middle East. By the late nineteenth century the lion had disappeared from Turkey and most of northern India, while the last sighting of a live Asiatic lion in Iran was in 1941 though the corpse of a lioness was found on the banks of Karun river, Khūzestān Province in 1944. There are no subsequent reliable reports from Iran.The subspecies now survives only in and around the Gir Forest of northwestern India.About 300 lions live in a 1,412 km² sanctuary in the state of Gujarat, which covers most of the forest. Their numbers are slowly increasing.
They were found in most of Africa, much of Eurasia from western Europe to India and the Bering land bridge, and in the Americas from Yukon to Peru. Parts of this range were occupied by subspecies that are extinct today.

Diet
Cooperative hunting enables lions to take prey as large as buffaloes, rhinos, hippos and giraffes. However, scavenged food provides more than 50% of their diets—lions will often take over kills made by other carnivores. Females do 85-90% of the hunting, usually by setting up an ambush into which they drive the prey. The kill is not shared equally within a pride, and at times of prey scarcity, high juvenile mortality rates occur, as hungry females may not even share with their offspring.