The lion is the king of the jungle

The lion (Panthera leo) is a member of the family Felidae and one of four "big cats" in the genus Panthera. With exceptional large males exceeding 250 kg (550 lb) in weight, (about 10,000 years ago), the lion was the most widespread large land mammal beside humans. They were found in most of Africa, much of Eurasia from western Europe to India, and the 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 northwest India, having disappeared from North Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia in historic times. Until the late PleistoceneBering land bridge and, in the Americas, from the Yukon to Peru.



The lion's name, similar in many Romance languages, derives from the Latin leo, and before that the Ancient Greek leōn/λεων. The Hebrew word lavi (לָבִיא) may also be related, as well as the Ancient Egyptian rw. It was one of the many species originally described, as Felis leo, by Linnaeus in his eighteenth century work, Systema Naturae. The generic component of its scientific designation, Panthera leo, is often presumed to derive from Greek pan- ("all") and ther ("beast"), but this may be a folk etymology. Although it came into English through the classical languages, panthera is probably of East Asian origin, meaning "the yellowish animal," or "whitish-yellow".