Recent discoveries illustrate varied diet of lions at Chicago’s Field Museum, including humans
United States.- The study of DNA in hairs found on lion teeth from the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicagodating back a century, has revealed details about the ecology and diet of these cats, which included humans.
Published in the journal Current Biology, the study shows how modern biotechnology allows the life of past species to be reconstructed in detail.
Background
In 1898, two lions attacked a workers’ camp in Tsavo, Kenya, killing 28 people before John Patterson, who was directing bridge construction, shot them down and sold them to the Field Museum in 1925.
Later, in the 1990s, Thomas Gnoske of the museum noticed that broken lion teeth contained traces of prey hair. This led to a detailed study of the samples using advanced microscopy and genomics techniques.
Revelations
Furthermore, it was discovered that the lions were males and brothers, originally from Kenya or Tanzania, and preyed on giraffes, humans, oryxes, waterbuck, wildebeest and zebra. Interestingly, they consumed giraffes and a Tsavo zebra, but not buffalo, which are the current preferred prey of lions in that region.
“Colonel Patterson hand-wrote a field diary during his stay in Tsavo and never recorded seeing buffalo or indigenous cattle,” says Kerbis Peterhans of the Field Museum, suggesting that a rinderpest epidemic may have affected these species.
Implications
The study’s authors believe these findings demonstrate the potential of new biotechnological technologies to explore natural history through museum specimens. Likewise, Ripan Malhi, from the University of Illinois, indicates that this methodology could be applied to older samples to study the evolution of the diet of carnivores.
The ultimate goal is to better understand when lions began to predate humans and how this has influenced current human-lion conflicts in Africa.
