As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone.
Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in Europe, say forensic anthropologist Timothy Thompson of Maynooth University in Ireland and colleagues.
The man’s remains, which date to between the years 200 and 300, come from what may have been a gladiator cemetery in the Roman city of Eboracum, now called York, the researchers report April 23 in PLOS ONE.
Bite marks on