Oct 11, 2024 10:00 am1400 views
In 1898, two male lions terrorized an encampment of bridge builders on the Tsavo River in Kenya. The infamous Tsavo “man-eaters” killed at least 28 people in the camp before the civil engineer on the project shot them dead. The lions’ remains were sold to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1925.
In a new study, Field Museum researchers collaborated with scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on an in-depth analysis of hairs carefully extracted from the lions’ broken teeth. The study used microscopy and genomics to identify some of the species the lions consumed.