A pair of male lions that roamed Kenya more than a century ago gained notoriety as the “man-eaters of Tsavo.” To be sure, the big cats hunted and ate people building a local railway. But a novel DNA analysis of hairs stuck in the cats’ tooth cavities is revealing a diverse — and occasionally surprising — menu.
The roughly 130-year-old dietary log consists of oryx, zebras and yes, humans, researchers report October 11 in Current Biology. Unexpectedly, traces of wildebeest also showed up: The herbivores weren’t known to roam the Tsavo region at that time, so the finding raises questions about how predator met prey. The analysis, which was
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