THE skull of an infamous man-eating lion has vindicated Jim Corbett, the
legendary big-game hunter of the 1920s and 1930s. Corbett always said that the
lions most dangerous to people are those least dangerous to their usual
prey.
In 1898, a pair of male lions earned a fearsome reputation by killing and
eating more than 130 workers building a railway bridge across the Tsavo River in
Kenya. Both lions were huge, measuring nearly 3 metres long when project
engineer John Henry Patterson finally shot them with a heavy rifle. He preserved
the skins and skulls, which he later sold to the Field Museum of Natural History
in Chicago.
Bruce Patterson, a zoologist at the Field Museum, has now examined the
skulls. Dental X-rays showed that one male had a broken canine tooth with 鈥渁
wicked abscess at the base鈥�, says Patterson.
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Lions use their canines to grab the throat or sever the spinal column of prey
such as buffalo and zebra. But 鈥渢his cat would have been unable to put any
pressure at all on this tooth,鈥� Patterson told the American Society of
Mammalogists last week in Durham, New Hampshire. 鈥淚t went looking for something
slower, softer and less capable of defending itself.鈥�
The second lion apparently had no crippling dental problems. But Patterson
thinks it could have had other disabilities or may simply have been following
the other more dominant male.