In 1731 king Frederick I of Sweden set a taxidermist to work on his recently deceased lion. The problem – the taxidermist had never seen a lion before

Frederick I of Sweden received a lion as a gift from the Bey of Algiers, and was so enamored with the beast that when it died he tried to have the beast taxidermied.

The only trouble was that for whatever reason, the taxidermist was only given the pelt and the bones of the beast to work from. The story goes that the poor taxidermist, lacking the modern conveniences of Wikipedia and Google image search just didn’t have the find understanding of large feline bone structure to put together a convincing facsimile. What you see below is the result.