The Ultimate Guide: Big Cats (1 of 19)

The Ultimate Guide: Big Cats

The Ultimate Guide-Big Cats It was late in evolution.
Long after life had moved onto the land.
Long after grasses carpeted the plains and creatures had evolved to eat those grasses that terrifying new creatures appeared.
These were animals that preyed on other living animals.
The carnivores were meat eaters.
And none were more ruthless than the big cats.
The Serengeti Plains of East Africa.
Sharing these prairies with vast migratory herds is the fastest land animal on Earth the cheetah.
And the most elusive of cats, the leopard.
And everyone's favorite, the King of the Jungle.
You can tell who is top of the heap here.

Only lions can afford to laze around the Serengeti in broad daylight.
Lions are enormously powerful, and are the largest of Africa's big cats.
They are the only cats that live in close family groups with intricate social lives.
A Lion pride usually consists of lionesses, often sisters and their young cubs.
Adult males compete for dominance of the family and the right to mate with the lionesses, that is, when they're awake.
The lions have come to dominate the Plains, even the other cats fear them.
And they have a great deal in common with another successful mammal, an upright ape which evolved here and came to dominate the entire planet.
It 's no surprise that we have such a close affiinity with lions.
We see in them our own contradictory nature from the intimacy of their close families to the stark brutality of their way of life.