Marozi

The Mazori or spotted lion is a large, spotted cat that has been seen throughout East and Central Africa. According to witnesses, the creature is smaller than a typical lion. Although it resembles its more well-known cousins, the marozi has a coat that’s covered with gray-brown spots across its back and sides. It is variously claimed by zoologists and cryptozoologists to be a distinct race of lion adapted for a montane rather than savanna-dwelling existence, a rare natural hybrid of a leopard and lion, or an adult lion that retained its childhood spots.

Appearance:

The marozi looks like an ordinary lion, but it is spotted as an adult.It's total length is described as  8 ft 8 in (2.64 m). Like lion cubs, they possess spots that are easily visible, being brown on a dark yellow background. According to native folklore, large numbers of marozis inhabited the Aberdare Mountains from ancient times until about 30 years ago, when they were killed off. Marozi skins and skulls were secured before the last of them presumably died out. According to hunters in the area the marozi is smaller than a normal lion.

However some experts say, normal lion cubs have spots much like a leopard, but instead of black spots on an orange body, they have brown spots on a tan body, lions are born with spots that fade when they mature, but this creature has some sort of mishap caused the spots not to fade.

Some sources state that the Marozi is a Lion/Hyena crossbreed; but this is rofoundly unlikely because of the lion and hyena being rival predators with completely different genetic makeups that to top it all off, compete with one another over the same food sources.

Chronology:

While Africans have been familiar with the animal and Europeans have been reported seeing spotted lions since roughly 1904,  In 1924, A. Blayney Percival supposedly shot a spotted lioness and her cubs. In the 1930s, Michael Trent shot and killed a pair of spotted lions that were responsible for raids on his cattle farm. 1931 when Kenyan farmer Michael Trent shot and killed two individuals in the Aberdare Mountains region at an elevation of 10,000 feet (3,000 m). The unusual spotted markings on what seemed to be smallish adult lions prompted interest from the Nairobi Game Department; they were from pubescent lions and yet had prominent spots that are typical only of cubs. 

Two years later, explorer Kenneth Gandar-Dower headed an expedition into the region in an attempt to capture or kill more specimens. He returned with only circumstantial evidence: three sets of tracks found at a similar elevation as Trent's lions (10,000–12,500 feet or 3,000–3,800 metres). They were believed to have been left by individuals that were tracking a herd of buffalo during a hunt, ruling out the possibility of the marozi being cubs. Dower also discovered that the natives had long differentiated the marozi from lions or leopards, which they referred to by different names. Aside from that, he found out that the marozi had also been called different names in other regions, such as "ntararago" in Uganda, "ikimizi" in Rwanda, and "abasambo" in Ethiopia. Around the same time four animals were sighted by Game Warden Captain R.E.Dent in the Aberdare Mountain region at an elevation of 10,000 feet (3,000 m). A pair sighted on the Kinangop Plateau by G. Hamilton-Snowball at an elevation of 11,500 feet (3,500 m). They were shot at but escaped.

Conclusion:

No reports of the marozi have surfaced from the Aberdare region since the 1930s and it is believed that the population has long since become extinct. The case still remains open. Some people claim that the spotted lion is a completely mythical creature.Reports of spotted lions are still fairly common throughout other parts of Africa, though.