Why do U.S. restaurants keep trying to sell lion meat? This month a Florida restaurant called Taco Fusion put $35 lion tacos on its menu, and a California restaurant called Mokutanya announced $70 lion skewers, its second such promotion in the past year. Public outrage rose up almost immediately, forcing both restaurants to remove the [...]

History books tell us that the last wild Barbary lion (Panthera leo leo) was probably killed in 1922 by a French colonial hunter in Morocco. But in repeating the tale of this well-documented death, the history books may have left a chapter or two out of the story. Barbary, or Atlas, lions once roamed throughout [...]

Pygmy elephants, Asiatic lions and Siamese crocodiles are among the endangered species in the news this week. Pygmy elephant update: Remember the 14 pygmy elephants (Elephas maximus borneensis) that were poisoned in Borneo back in February? There’s both good and bad news about the case. The good news is that Baby Joe, the youngster that [...]

Ethiopian lions, Florida panthers, Sumatran rhinos and Yangtze porpoises are among the endangered species in the news this week. Well that was Interesting: The Internet was abuzz this week with “news” about how a pack of lions in Ethiopia supposedly saved a teenage girl from kidnapping rapists. That story actually dates back to 2005 but—as [...]

Every day 20 unusual lions greet visitors at a tiny animal park in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. These lions, which have spent generations in captivity, are not like most African lions (Panthera leo leo). For one thing, they are slightly smaller than the wild lions found elsewhere on the continent. For another, the males carry distinctive [...]

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week that African lions (Panthera leo leo) may deserve protected status under the Endangered Species Act. The decision, published November 27 in the Federal Register, comes in response to a petition (pdf) filed in March 2011 by five conservation groups that argued that American hunters pose a [...]

They are mostly forgotten today, but Asiatic lions (Panthera leo persica) once roamed in vast numbers across the Indian subcontinent, Mediterranean and Middle East until overhunting brought them to within a hair’s breadth of extinction. By 1907, when an Indian prince finally banned hunting and protected the last lions, only 13 members of the subspecies [...]

After coexisting for thousands of years, humans and African lions (Panthera leo) are on a collision course. Lion populations have dropped from 450,000 animals 50 years ago to as few as 20,000 today. Most of that decline has taken place over the past two decades, and experts are now predicting that the big cats could [...]

A coalition of conservation groups filed a petition Tuesday to list the African lion (Panthera leo) as a protected species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), citing the American appetite for sports hunting and lion products—such as lion-skin rugs—as major factors in the big cat’s decline. The petition was filed by the International Fund [...]