The Roaring Royals: 15 Fascinating Facts About Lions

1. A lion's roar owes its power to unusually shaped vocal folds.

A lion's roar can reach around 114 decibels and carry up to 8 kilometres (5 miles) across the savanna. A 2011 study published in PLOS ONE found the secret: unlike most animals, lions have flat, square-shaped vocal folds with a thick layer of fatty tissue. This lets them produce extremely loud, low-pitched sound with surprisingly little lung pressure. Lions mostly roar at dusk and through the night to announce their territory and keep track of pride members.

2. Only lions among the big cats live in true family groups.

Tigers, leopards and jaguars are solitary, but lions live in prides that can include more than a dozen related females, their cubs and a coalition of males. The females are the permanent core of the pride and usually stay in the territory where they were born for their whole lives. Males, by contrast, are newcomers that often hold a pride for only a few years before younger rivals drive them out.

3. When new males take over a pride, they often kill the cubs.

Long-term research by the Serengeti Lion Project showed that males who take over a pride frequently kill the young cubs sired by their predecessors. It sounds brutal, but it has a grim evolutionary logic: mothers who lose their cubs come back into breeding condition much sooner. The new males can therefore father their own offspring before they, too, are overthrown. Females fight back by defending their cubs together.

4. Lionesses raise their cubs in a shared nursery.

Females in a pride often give birth around the same time and pool their cubs into a group researchers call a crèche. Within it, mothers will suckle cubs that are not their own. The arrangement helps them guard the youngsters against infanticidal males and hyenas while some of the adults go hunting. Cubs raised in a crèche have a better chance of surviving their dangerous first year.

5. Lions spend most of the day doing almost nothing.

Lions are among the laziest of the big cats and can rest or sleep for up to 20 hours a day. Hunting large prey takes short bursts of huge effort, and lions are poorly built for long chases, so saving energy is a survival strategy. Much of their activity happens at night and in the cooler hours around dawn and dusk.

6. Most of their hunts end in failure.

Despite their reputation as perfect predators, lions fail far more often than they succeed. Studies in the Serengeti found that only about a quarter to a third of hunts end with a kill. Lionesses do most of the hunting in open country, often working as a team that encircles prey. Research in South Africa's Kruger National Park showed that males are also capable hunters, but they tend to ambush prey alone in dense vegetation, where their bulky mane is less of a giveaway.

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7. A dark mane is a sign of a healthy, powerful male.

In a 2002 study published in Science, researchers Peyton West and Craig Packer placed life-size toy lions with manes of different lengths and colours in the Serengeti. Lionesses preferred to approach dummies with dark manes, while males avoided them. Darker manes turned out to signal higher testosterone levels and better nutrition. The trade-off is heat: dark manes absorb more sunlight, which is one reason lions in hotter regions tend to have smaller manes.

8. Lions have a hidden spur at the tip of their tail.

Buried in the black tuft at the end of a lion's tail is a small, hard spur made of keratin, the same material as fingernails. It is not attached to the tail bones, and nobody knows for certain what it is for. The ancient Romans and later naturalists speculated that lions used it to whip themselves into a fury, but today the spur is regarded as a curious anatomical oddity with no confirmed function.

9. Their tongues are rough enough to strip skin.

A lion's tongue is covered in sharp, backward-facing spines called papillae, made of hardened keratin. They work like a rasp, scraping meat off bones and combing dirt and parasites out of fur during grooming. The spines are so rough that a few licks from a lion could scrape away human skin.

10. India still has wild lions, all of them in one region.

Asiatic lions once roamed from the Middle East to India, but hunting pushed them to the edge of extinction by the early 20th century. Their last refuge was the Gir Forest in Gujarat, where the population is thought to have fallen to just a few dozen animals. Thanks to strict protection, the 2020 count recorded 674 Asiatic lions, and their numbers have continued to grow. Asiatic lions are slightly smaller than their African cousins and have a distinctive fold of skin running along the belly.

11. The Tsavo man-eaters killed far fewer people than legend claims.

In 1898, two maneless male lions terrorised workers building the Uganda Railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson, who finally shot them, claimed they had killed 135 people. In 2009, scientists analysed chemical signatures in the lions' bones and hair and estimated that the pair had eaten around 35 people in total. Their remains are on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

12. White lions are not albinos.

The famous white lions of the Timbavati region in South Africa owe their pale coat to a rare recessive gene that causes leucism, not albinism. Unlike albino animals, white lions have normal pigment in their eyes, which are usually blue-grey or gold, and their lips and paw pads stay dark. Both parents must carry the gene for a white cub to be born, which is why white lions are so rare in the wild.

13. Some lions regularly climb trees.

Lions are not known as climbers, but in a few places they have made trees their second home. The most famous examples live in the Ishasha sector of Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda and around Lake Manyara in Tanzania. Researchers believe they climb to escape biting flies, catch a cooling breeze and keep an eye on prey. Climbing seems to be a learned habit that is passed down within prides.

14. A lion cub from the Ice Age has been found almost perfectly preserved.

Lions once lived across Europe, northern Asia and the Americas, and the extinct cave lion appears in prehistoric paintings such as those in France's Chauvet Cave. In 2018, a frozen cave lion cub nicknamed Sparta was found in the permafrost of Yakutia, Siberia. Scientists dated it to about 28,000 years ago, and it still had its fur, whiskers, skin and internal organs. Its relative, the American lion, roamed North America until the end of the last Ice Age, and many of its fossils have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

15. African lions have disappeared from most of their former range.

Lions are listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, and the African population is estimated at only about 20,000 to 25,000 animals. The IUCN's 2015 assessment found that lion numbers had fallen by around 43 percent in just two decades. They have vanished from more than 90 percent of their historical range, mainly because of habitat loss, conflict with livestock farmers and a decline in their prey. Today, lions survive mostly in protected areas in eastern and southern Africa.