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The Ghost in the Darkness

In 1898, a pair of lions terrorized an encampment of bridge builders in Kenya, killing at least 28 people before they were shot dead. In the intervening years, the story has inspired multiple books and film adaptations. Today, DNA genome analysis is adding a new chapter to that story. We’ll explore in the U.S. National Science Foundation’s “Discovery Files”. The remains of those man-eating lions were sold to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1925. In the 1990s a researcher there found the skulls in storage. He noticed that thousands of broken and compacted hairs had accumulated in the lions’ damaged teeth during their lifetimes. A collaboration including NSF-supported researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have extracted mitochondrial DNA from the hair samples found in the the lion’s teeth and are revealing insights into their diet. Previous studies have found that hair structure preserves mitochondrial DNA and protects it from external contamination, this allowed the researchers to reconstruct the genomes necessary to identify the potential prey species. Analysis of the hair DNA identified giraffes, several kinds of antelopes, humans, and zebra as prey, and also identified hairs that originated from the lions themselves, revealing that they were siblings. The findings are an important expansion of the kinds of data that can be extracted from skulls and hairs from the past. Further research could reconstruct the lions’ diet over time and perhaps pinpoint when their habit of preying on humans began.