New DNA findings shed light on Tsavo's infamous man-eating lions

Scientists have uncovered new insights into the diet of the infamous Tsavo man-eating lions after analyzing clumps of hair found in the predators' teeth.

In 1898, a pair of male lions (Panthera leo) killed and devoured dozens of workers constructing a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya — killing at least 35 people. They stalked and terrorized the workers for nine months before being shot later that year. Since then, their bodies have been kept at the Field museum of Natural History in Chicago.

In a new study, scientists extracted the DNA from clumps of hair found in the lions' teeth.

Their findings identified six prey species, which raises new questions about the lions' distribution in Kenya at the time they were alive.

"We found mitochondrial genetic material from giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest and zebra as prey, and also identified hair that came from the lions themselves," study co-author Alida de Flamingh, a biologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told Live Science in an email. The researchers published their findings Friday (Oct. 11) in the journal Current Biology.

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They conducted a genomic analysis on the hair, extracting mitochondrial DNA from four individual strands and three hair clumps. They then compared the genetic profiles to a list of potential prey species, created from previous research, to identify which species the lions may have hunted during their lifetime.