Yalis are hindu mythological Lions believed to be more powerful than Lions themselves and are commonly found as statues on pillars of temple prakarams. In a recent trip to Sringeri I found there were stone balls inside their wide open mouths that cannot be taken out. In that same trip I read about balls being present in Yali statues' elsewhere in TamilNadu and was pleasantly surprised at the coincidence of my sighting the balls, for the first time and reading about the same.

The question is do temples generally all have Yali statues with balls inside their mouths? Is it a feature of Dravidian architecture or an exception?