Eur J Wildl Res (2006) 52: 54–58 DOI 10.1007/s10344-005-0009-z SHORT COMMUNICATION Joachim Burger . Helmut Hemmer Urgent call for further breeding of the relic zoo population of the critically endangered Barbary lion (Panthera leo leo Linnaeus 1758) Received: 7 April 2005 / Accepted: 9 June 2005 / Published online: 10 November 2005 # Springer-Verlag 2005 Abstract The Barbary lion became extinct in the wild around 1942. Since the end of the 19th century, a last pure- bred captive breeding stock existed at the court of Morocco. The rest of these animals became the core exhibition of the new Rabat Zoo after passing through repeated bottlenecks and possibly some introgression events by foreign lions. This study uses mitochondrial DNA sequencing data to clarify the relationship among these lions and their sub- Saharan and Asian relatives. We analysed mitochondrial cytochrome b sequences obtained from a sample from a Barbary lion descended from a young female of the Barbary lion breeding group at the Rabat Zoo and various other members of the genus Panthera. In our cytochrome-b-based phylogenetic tree, the North African Barbary lion, repre- sented by a biopsy sample from the Neuwied Zoo, joins the Asian lion clade, although it is slightly different from its Asian sister group. However, it is clearly distinct from sub- Saharan lions and can be considered as a genetically defined phylogeographic group of its own. Molecular dating of the extant sub-Saharan and Asian lion groups shows that the split between North African Barbary lions and Asian lions must be considerably more recent than 74–203 kilo years ago. Keywords Panthera . Molecular phylogeny . Lion conservation . Supportive breeding Abbreviations ky: kilo years . kya: kilo years ago . bp: base pairs . BP: before present Introduction In addition to the sub-Saharan (Panthera leo senegalensis group) and the Indian lions (Panthera leo persica), the Barbary lion (Atlas lion, Panthera leo leo Linnaeus 1758) represents the third major extant phylogeographic lion group (Fig. 1). The distinction between Indian and African lions is clear-cut, especially in skull morphology (Hemmer 1974), and a molecular divergence date of 74–203 kilo years (ky, thousand years) was recently obtained (Burger et al. 2004). However, how close the genetic relationship is between North African and sub-Saharan lions is still the subject of debate. First molecular results based on lions brought from Rabat to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, were published by O’Brien et al. (1987). Working with electrophoretic variation in 46 to 50 allozyme loci, the authors found only low genetic distance estimates among Barbary lions, sub-Saharan African lions and Indian lions. At about the same time, O’Brien observed a protein variation between African lions, including the Barbary zoo population, and Indian lions (oral presentation at the 1986 International Tiger Symposium in Minneapolis). Accord- ingly, all recent lions were lumped into only two subspe- cies, an African and an Indian one. Analysis of the historical record and morphology pro- duces different, even contradictory results. The Barbary lion became extinct in the wild during the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Its story probably ended in 1891 in Tunisia and in 1893 in Algeria but not before 1942 in Morocco (Yamaguchi and Haddane 2002). A last purebred captive Barbary lion group was installed at the end of the 19th century in the lions’ garden of the sultan of Morocco. Some lions of this then still- flourishing palace breeding group were sold during the sultan’s exile between 1953 and 1955. King Hassan II later transferred the remaining animals to the newly founded Moroccan National Zoo (Hemmer 1978a; Yamaguchi and Haddane 2002) where they served as a visitor highlight. Unfortunately, we cannot exclude the possibility of mul- tiple genetic introgressions by lions introduced into this captive breeding group from other sources during the line’s J. Burger (*) Institute of Anthropology, Mainz University, Saarstrasse 21, 55099 Mainz, Germany e-mail: jburger@uni-mainz.de H. Hemmer Institute of Zoology, Mainz University, Saarstrasse 21, 55099 Mainz, Germany