Cecil the lion at Hwange National Park in 2010
They rank among the most feared predators of all time and yet millions are now considered our best friends. They are classified as felidae, scien-tese for felines of all sizes and colors. They share a close genetic relationship with other good friends and long-standing enemies that hunt and bark and cuddle their young on the land and in the sea. They are memorialized in song and story and poems, and this is one of
my favorites:
Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.
Not everyone likes them as pets, but just about every person on Earth admires their amazing agility and near perfect hunting skills. It is sad that we may soon lose the most magnificent examples of all to human activity and human stupidity. For a brief review of how cats came to be and where they may be going, follow below and join in the discussion.
Lions are mammals of course, and like all mammals, they have a recognizable ancestral lineage stretching clear back to the Cambrian, more than half a billion years ago, in the form of primitive chordates and vertebrates. But it's during the Permian more than 250 million years ago that the first mammal-like reptiles appear. Lions and tigers and bears, and you and I and your little dog too, all probably descend form something that looked like this adorable
Thrinaxodon liorhinus to the right, that could be found throughout the late Permian and early Triassic hanging out in the rocky outcrops and jungle borders in the long-lost symphosis of Southern Africa and Antarctica.
Like the rest of us furry creatures, true mammals and the first recognizable ancestors of modern-day cats would have to wait for the demise of the land-dwelling (non-feathered) dinosaurs to get blasted off the planet 65 million years ago and then some. The earliest antecedents of carnivora, the order that contains modern cats, canines, bears, and pinnipeds like seals and walruses, are called miacids and appear in the fossil record a little around 50 million years ago.
The oldest known full-fledged cat or felid is the ancient Proailurus, which stalked the forests of Europe and Asia beginning about 25 million years ago. It was this genera or something very close to it that likely gave rise to an astonishing array of magnificent cats. That includes the saber tooth, also known as smilidon, and the cave panthers, and it extends to all prehistoric and modern tigers. It also includes the modern cheetah, the fastest land animal on Earth, which has been reliably clocked running down prey at over 70 mph!
Today, almost every single species of these big cats is endangered. Some of them, like the snow leopard, may be too far gone to save, although a lot of people are trying to do just that. Which brings us to the lions, and one in particular.
The nation was shocked and many were horrified to learn last month that a partly tamed, older lion named Cecil had been lured away from his sanctuary in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe and shot with a crossbow by American dentist Walter Palmer. For sport, for the fun of it, and for grisly trophies in the form of head and skin.
In some places and times lions are a pest, in others they are an outright danger—you wouldn't want a pride of lions living in your backyard where your kids play and explore. It's interesting that lions have managed to survive repeated ice ages and the rise of paleolithic human ancestors. Somehow, our forefathers seem to get along with lions, or at least co-exist in the forests and on the plains with them, for millions of years. It was only with the advent of more modern weapons, especially guns, and continued human encroachment into their habitats that their numbers begin to dwindle at an alarming rate. By some estimates they have dropped from over 100,000 just a decade or two ago to less than 20,000 in the entire world now.
If we extrapolate that rate of loss into the future, in just a few years—maybe a decade or two—there will be no sustainable lion populations left alive, outside of captivity. Without a healthy degree of genetic diversity, those tiny groups of survivors won't last long.
You want to charge hunters to hunt lions for sport or sell their preserved body parts? Fine, start a lion ranch and farm lions; just think how that would fly on FarmersOnly.com! But for chrissake, don't whittle away further at the dwindling numbers of already magnificent, endangered species in the wild. They won't survive, and generations of people will be robbed of the privilege of seeing these incredible megafauna in the wild for all time.