This is widely believed to be the last ever photo taken of a Barbary Lion (a species now extinct). The picture was taken from on board a Casablanca-Dacar flight in 1925.
Barbary Lions were among the largest lions ever, and were famously used for entertainment/fights in Gladiator Arenas.
The Romans killed thousands of lions in their games, the Arab empire that followed squeezed the remaining animals into smaller territories, and the arrival of European hunters in the 19th century polished them off. Europeans killed so many of these animals that they were quickly exterminated from most of their remaining historic range.
