Flying from Casablanca to Dakar in 1925, French military photographer Marcelin Flandrin captured this photo in the Atlas Mountains. This is the last known image of a wild Barbary Lion.
The species massively declined in the mid-1800s due to human settlement in northern Africa pushing them out of coastal areas and depriving them of food sources. Then bounties for lion’s heads finished them off by the 1880s, except for in small pockets of remote wilderness.
