Topic summary
African lion
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Lion.
Subspecies
In the 19th and 20th centuries, several lion type specimens were described and proposed as subspecies, with about a dozen recognised as validtaxa until 2017. Between 2008 and 2016, IUCN Red List assessors used only two subspecific names: P. l. leo for African lion populations, and P. l. persica for the Asiatic lion population. In 2017, the Cat Classification Task Force of the Cat Specialist Group revised lion taxonomy, and recognises two subspecies based on results of several phylogeographic studies on lion evolution, namely: