Marozi
The Marozi are spotted-fur lions that are said to be native to Kenya . The actual existence of these animals has not been proven and they are accordingly treated as cryptids .
description
The Marozi are physically similar to smaller lions . The spots on her fur are striking. It should resemble that of the leopards . The spots are arranged in oblique, vertical lines on the animal's body. Furthermore, the animals should only travel in pairs, which is unusual for both lions and leopards.
history
Reports of sightings of the spotted lions are known from the first years of the 20th century. The native Kikuyu reported to the British officer Richard Meinertzhagen in 1903 about the marozi , the spotted lions, which the tribe clearly distinguished from the lions, the simba . In 1924 the naturalist Blayney Percival reported on a pair of lions with extremely unusual fur that he had shot himself.
Another sighting succeeded George Hamilton-Snowball in the Aberdares . The first time he heard about the spotted lions after shooting a leopard that was unusually large and dark in color. Its porters told him that this was not a normal leopard, but a damasia . These beings would be as different from leopards as a lion would be from a Marozi. In the fall of 1923, Hamilton-Snowball was crossing the mountains on foot when he saw two lions moving towards him, almost 200 meters away. Because of the poor visibility, he took them for two very yellow-brown colored and soaked leopards. He wondered why the wearer kept whispering “Marozi, Marozi”. After the two animals disappeared in the nearby forest, the big game hunter asked his companions about these animals. They told him that the Marozi lived up here in the mountain forests and that only two people were out there.
Powy Cobb, who was very knowledgeable about the wildlife of Africa, was convinced that an unknown species of lion lived in the mountains. On one of his regular patrols, he surprised an unknown big cat that had already attacked several cows on his farm. He described her as a big cat lying between leopard and lion in terms of size. He chased the animal into the thick forest, but had to give up the chase there. The footprints found later resembled those of a little lion.
In 1931 the farmer Michael Trent succeeded in proving the existence of the animals. With the help of a bait, he lured a pair of Marozi in the Aberdare Mountains and shot them. The farmer kept the fur as trophies and left the carcasses of the animals behind. Scientists later tried to find the remains of the bodies, but only parts of one of the skulls could be recovered and examined. The male animal's fur is kept in the private collection of the Natural History Museum in London, where it was also examined by zoologist and predator expert Reginald Pocock . Pockock and Bernard Heuvelmans , the founder of modern cryptozoology , gave the Marozi the scientific name Leo maculatus , the spotted lion .
In 1934, Kenneth Gandar-Dower led an expedition to the Mount Kenya Massif and the Aberdare Range to catch a Marozi, but was unsuccessful.
controversy
Despite the supposed evidence, the existence of the Marozi remains controversial. The stories of the spotted lions of Kenya were dismissed as romantic wilderness fairy tales after World War II . Many explanations have been given for the Marozi sightings. Some researchers assumed simple optical illusions, others pointed out that hybrids of lions and leopards were already known in zoos , and an atavistic pattern of spots occurs in adults , which normally only young animals have. Only a few held fast to the existence of a new species of lion that had adapted to life in the mountain forests.