Thanks to Pranav for suggesting this mystery big cat this week, the marozi!

Further reading:

From Black Lions to Living Sabre-Tooths: My Top Ten Mystery Cats

Spotted Lions

A young lioness who still has some of her cub spots:



Subadult lions who still have a lot of cub spots:



The skin of an animal supposedly killed in 1931 and said to be a marozi:



Two photos of a "leopon," a lion-leopard hybrid bred in captivity in a Japanese zoo:



Show transcript:
Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.
This week we’re going to learn about a mystery animal suggested by Pranav. It’s the marozi, a big cat from the mountains of Kenya.
Kenya is in east Africa, and humans have lived in what is now Kenya since humans existed. Because of this, usually when we talk about Kenya or east Africa, we’re talking about hominins, but today we’re talking about big cats.
Kenya is home to a lot of animals you think of when someone mentions the animals of Africa, like elephants and giraffes, and it’s also home to three big cats: lions, leopards, and cheetahs. The lion is generally a tawny brown color although different individuals and populations can be various shades of brown or gray. A lion cub is born with dark spots, and as it grows the spots fade. Sometimes a young adult lion will still have some spots, especially on its legs and belly, but in general an adult lion has no spots at all. In comparison, both the leopard and the cheetah are famous for their spots.
The lion prefers to live in savannas and open woodlands. These days it’s only found in a few parts of India, along with various places in sub-Saharan Africa. This just means south of the Sahara desert. In the past, though, the lion had a much larger range. It lived throughout most of Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia, and even southern Europe. Overhunting drove it to extinction in many parts of its historic range, which is called extirpation. I’ve used the term before but it specifically means that an animal has been driven to extinction in one area where it once lived, but it isn’t extinct in other areas. Some subspecies of lion have gone extinct, and the lions who remain are vulnerable to habitat loss, poaching, and many other factors. Just because lions are common in zoos doesn’t mean lions in the wild are doing fine.
The same is true of the cheetah, which has an even smaller range than the lion these days but which was once common throughout Africa and the Middle East along with a lot of southern Asia and Europe. We talked about the cheetah in episode 145. It’s actually not closely related to the lion or the leopard, and in fact genetic testing reveals that it’s most closely related to the puma of North America.
The leopard, on the other hand, is a very close relation to the lion. Both belong to the same genus, Panthera, which also includes tigers, jaguars, and snow leopards, but the lion and leopard are the closest cousins. While it’s also vulnerable to habitat loss, poaching, and other factors, it’s more widespread than the lion and cheetah. It lives throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia--especially India--and even parts of eastern Russia, and in the past it was even more widespread. It prefers forests where its spots help it blend in with dappled sun and shade.
So, the lion, the leopard, and the cheetah all live in Kenya, but there’s another big cat that’s supposed to live there too. It’s called the marozi, also sometimes called the spotted lion.
Stories of lions that have spots like a leopard go back for centuries among the local people. The spotted lion is supposed to be small and the male either has no mane or only a small one. It’s supposed to live in the mountains and is solitary instead of living in family groups like ordinary lions. In fact, “marozi” supposedly means “solitary lion” in the local language. Instead of living in open grasslands, it lives in thick forest where a spotted coat and smaller body s...