In 1925, a photographer flying from Casablanca to Dakar looked down and photographed a lone male lion in North Africa. The books say the last wild Barbary lion had already been shot three years earlier. They were wrong, and that is only the beginning of the story.
This film follows the real research: the last recorded sightings in Morocco and Algeria, the lions kept by the sultans of Morocco and their descendants at Rabat Zoo, the plan to breed them back and return them to the Atlas Mountains, the 2006 DNA test of five royal lions, and two medieval lion skulls dug out of the moat at the Tower of London. Every number in this film comes from a published source, including the studies by Black et al. (2013), Barnett et al. (2006, 2008) and Lehocká et al. (2021).
#barbarylion #atlaslion #extinctanimals #wildlifedocumentary #animaldiscovery
00:00 The lion in the 1925 photograph
03:29 The king’s lions
07:05 A plan to bring them home
09:20 The DNA test
11:51 Two skulls in a London moat
14:25 Three answers and a living relative
