Yes this is it. It is kind of ironic considering wolves have historically been feared and despised in Christian Europe. Instead the Europeans revered the African Lion. I guess it was easier to glorify and admire a predator when it was not around to kill your cattle or humans. Atleast the Turko-Mongols were mature enough to take the good with the bad and revere the wolf, which is native to their homelands, instead of dream up some ridiculous Noble Lion type of a myth about a foreign predator that they've only heared about in stories. FOR YOUR INFORMATION, lions used to inhabit North Africa, the Middle East and parts of Europe.    I realize the wikipedia may not always be the most accurate source, but this is just to give you an idea....      In relatively recent times the habitat of lions spanned the southern parts of  Eurasia , ranging from  Greece  to  India , and most of  Africa  except the central  rainforest -zone and the  Sahara  desert.  Herodotus  reported that lions had been common in Greece around 480 BC; they attacked the baggage camels of the Persian king  Xerxes  on his march through the country.  Aristotle  considered them rare by 300 BC and by 100 AD extirpated. [116]  A population of the  Asiatic Lion  survived until the tenth century in the  Caucasus , their last  European  outpost. [117]     The species was eradicated from  Palestine  by the  Middle Ages  and from most of the rest of Asia after the arrival of readily available firearms in the eighteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they became extinct in  North Africa  and the  Middle East . By the late nineteenth century the lion had disappeared from  Turkey  and most of northern India, [19] [118]  while the last sighting of a live Asiatic lion in  Iran  was in 1941 (between  Shiraz  and Jahrom,  Fars Province ), though the corpse of a lioness was found on the banks of  Karun  river,  Khūzestān Province  in 1944. There are no subsequent reliable reports from  Iran . [74]  The subspecies now survives only in and around the  Gir Forest  of northwestern India. [23]  About 300 lions live in a 1,412 km² (558 square miles) sanctuary in the state of  Gujarat , which covers most of the forest. Their numbers are slowly increasing. [119]   They were found in most of Africa, much of Eurasia from western Europe to India and the  Bering land bridge , and in the Americas from  Yukon  to Peru. [31]  Parts of this range were occupied by subspecies that are extinct today.