Which 1758 book established the lion's formal scientific description?

The 1758 book that established the lion’s formal scientific description was Systema Naturae. Carl Linnaeus’s 10th edition provided the zoological framework in which the lion was classified as Felis leo, the name later revised into the modern genus Panthera.

Systema Naturae began as a much shorter work in 1735, but its 10th edition, published in Stockholm in 1758, is especially important. Zoologists generally treat that edition as the starting point of modern zoological nomenclature. Linnaeus organized living things into nested groups and used two-part names consistently, creating the foundation of binomial nomenclature.

The book’s title is Latin and means “System of Nature.” It attempted to arrange animals, plants and minerals into an orderly system, reflecting the 18th-century ambition to catalogue the natural world. The 1758 edition was followed by an expanded 12th edition in 1766–1768.

A common mistake is to choose Historia Animalium, an earlier work by Conrad Gessner, or Darwin’s The Origin of Species. Those books are historically important, but neither supplied the 1758 Linnaean classification used for the lion.