Michael Trent's marozi: the spotted lions of the Aberdare Range

The Aberdare Range rises over central Kenya, then a British colony. Talk of strange lions in these mountains went back decades. Col. Richard Meinertzhagen described "dark lions with rosette-like markings" in Kenya's mountains in 1903, though his reliability as a source is widely disputed. Local communities, among them the Kikuyu, had their own view. They told the marozi apart from ordinary lions and from leopards.

1931. Michael Trent, a settler farmer in the Aberdares, shot two lions at about 10,000 feet. An adult male and an adult female. Smallish animals. He kept the skins as trophies.

Large "jaguarine" rosettes ran in obliquely vertical lines over the flanks, shoulders and thighs. Solid spots marked the legs and belly. The spots ran "right up to the spine itself." The male's mane was insignificant, its neck hair no more than 5 inches long. His skin measured about 8 ft 8 in in total.

Trent was not alone. Game Warden Capt. R. E. Dent reported four spotted lions at about 10,000 feet. G. Hamilton-Snowball saw a pair on the Kinangop Plateau at 11,500 feet. They were shot at, but escaped.

The Nairobi Game Department took an interest in the skins. It lacked the skeletal evidence to prove the species or the age. Kenneth Gandar Dower, an English sportsman, aviator and author, set out to settle the matter. With the settler Raymond Hook, he went into the mountains hoping to capture a living marozi or collect more specimens. Accounts place the expedition in 1933, 1934 or 1935.

He came back with no animal, only three sets of tracks between 10,000 and 12,500 feet. They seemed to show animals tracking a herd of buffalo during a hunt. To Gandar Dower, that ruled out cubs. He obtained Trent's skin, and a skull thought to go with it. In 1937 he published The Spotted Lion.

R. I. Pocock, carnivore specialist at the British Museum (Natural History) in London, examined the male skin. He judged it to be from a lion "probably three years old." He wrote: "It is a remarkable specimen owing to the distinctness of the spots in a beast of its size."

The skull was a problem. The skulls had not been kept when the animals were skinned. One presumed to belong to them, with all the teeth and the lower jaw missing, was later picked up near the spot. Pocock stayed careful. "It is clear that no precise conclusion can be formed regarding this interesting beast until skins and skulls of adults have been collected."

The consensus view is plainer. Noel Simon wrote in 1962 that these were "plains lions which have retained their cub spots into adult life." C. A. W. Guggisberg noted that "juvenile markings do not fade for quite a number of years," and that he had "seen two-year-old lions on the Athi Plains, showing just about the same rosettes." W. Robert Foran, in The Field in 1950, suggested a small group of Somali lions had moved into the Aberdares. Popular writers have floated a leopard and lion hybrid, though no scientific support has been cited.

Bernard Heuvelmans proposed the name Leo maculatus in 1955 and covered the case in On the Track of Unknown Animals. The name has never been formally recognised. Karl Shuker returned to the spotted lions in his books on mystery cats. The only question is what animal they came from. And the marozi, alive, has never been seen on film.