The Sri Lanka Lion also known as the Ceylon Lion, was a prehistoric subspecies

Subspecies

Subspecies in biological classification, is either a taxonomic rank subordinate to species, ora taxonomic unit in that rank . A subspecies cannot be recognized in isolation: a species will either be recognized as having no subspecies at all or two or more, never just one...

 of lion

Lion

The lion is one of the four big cats in the genus Panthera, and a member of the family Felidae. With some males exceeding 250 kg in weight, it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger...

, endemic to Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...

. It appears to have become extinct prior to the arrival of culturally modern humans, c.

Circa

Circa , usually abbreviated c. or ca. , means "approximately" in the English language, usually referring to a date...

 37,000 years BC.

This lion is only known from two teeth found in depostits at Kuruwita

Kuruwita

Kuruwita is a town in the Ratnapura District of Sabaragamuwa Province of Sri Lanka. It is 120 km from Colombo. It used to be served by a narrow gauge branch of the national railway system....

. Based on these teeth, P. Deraniyagala

Paul E. P. Deraniyagala

Dr. Paules Edward Pieris Deraniyagala was a paleontologist, zoologist, and also an artist from Sri Lanka. He specialised in fauna and human fossils of the Indian subcontinent. Between 1939 - 1963 he was the Director of the National Museum of Ceylon, and between 1961 - 64 he was also the Dean of...

 erected this subspecies in 1939. However, there is insufficient information to determine how it might differ from other subspecies of lion. Deraniyagala did not explain explicitly how he diagnosed the holotype

Holotype

A holotype is a single physical example of an organism, known to have been used when the species was formally described. It is either the single such physical example or one of several such, but explicitly designated as the holotype...

 of this subspecies as belonging to a lion, though he justified its allocation to a distinct subspecies of lion by its being "narrower and more elongate" than those of recent lions in the British Natural History Museum

Natural History Museum

The Natural History Museum is one of three large museums on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London, England . Its main frontage is on Cromwell Road...

collection.