A young male mountain lion was found dead last week in a bobcat snare in McKenzie County.

The 50-pound male lion was found Jan. 30 by a trapper about 10 miles northwest of Grassy Butte in the Badlands, the North Dakota Game and Fish Department announced Monday.

The immature cat was the second inadvertently taken in a two-week span in roughly the same area. In mid-January, a bobcat trapper found a 46-pound male lion in one of his foothold traps north of Theodore Roosevelt National Park's North Unit. Its injuries were so severe that it was put down.

The lions were caught within 11 miles of each other.

Both were less than a year old and likely to have been born in North Dakota, said Dorothy Fecske, NDGFD furbearer biologist.

"It's further confirmation of a breeding population in the Badlands," she added.

Biological samples taken from the cat will further research about lions in the state, she added. Fecske plans to do necropsies Friday on the two young cats, including taking DNA samples to determine if they are related.

"It's possible they could be from the same litter and traveling with their mother," she said Monday.

The U.S. Forest Service Genetics Laboratory in Missoula, Mont., is handling the state's samples and plans to begin analyzing them in early March, Fecske added, and paternity results are expected in April.

Losing two young mountain lions will have only minimal impact on the state's lion population, Fecske said. Litters of two and three kittens are equally common for lions, she added.

"The adult female is still alive, will come into estrus again and will have another litter," she explained.

There is no estimate of North Dakota's mountain lion population.

"We don't know how many are in the Badlands. We know we have a breeding population, and there have been confirmed sightings throughout the Badlands," she said. "The loss of two kittens is pretty minimal."

A third lion, caught in a foot-hold trap in Billings County in November, was fitted with a radio collar and released. Biologists have been monitoring the 11/2-year-old, 108-pound lion weekly and have found the animal staying within a 25-square-mile area of its release site.

(Reach outdoor writer Richard Hinton at 701-250-8256 or richard.hinton@;bismarcktribune.com.)