The tale teeth tell about the legendary man-eating lions of Tsavo

the Tsavo Lions were two man-eating Lions that killed a series of individuals back in 1898 they were collected by Colonel Patterson after he went to Kenya in the Xaba region to help build a railroad and so at this time there was an influx of lots of individuals helping to build the railroad at the same time prey was declining on the landscape and so these Lions that went out and eventually ate and consumed numerous humans during this time the most the things that I study when extinct thousands if not millions of years ago and so we have to use different tools to get at what her diet was and their ecology overall and so the tools that I use are perfect for actually trying to understand the motivations behind these sort of man-eating lions while at the Field Museum we took molds of the teeth was noted in blue here with a dental impression material and once we got back to Vanderbilt we put a putty around it so that we could actually cast it we made an exact replica which is this clear task right here and this captures all of the microscopic detail of the tooth we can then place this tooth underneath the microscope and actually scan that microwave surface in three dimension and recreate the surface textures of the tooth itself now the reigning idea before we did this study was that they were sort of desperately eating hard things carcasses and sort of selected humans as their last resort we've actually sort of changed that idea but it seems that humans might have been a solution to their problem and what their problem was is both the one of the man-eaters the sava man-eaters and the other Moussaoui maneater had severe damage to their jaws and or teeth so one had a extremely large cavity which abscessed and they actually lost some other lower incisors the other had a large trauma to its lower jaw and in both of these scenarios they may have had a very hard time capturing larger prey so as you can imagine hunting a wildebeest can incur quite a bit of damage especially if you're having to subdue that prey and hold it down with your jaw and teeth and so if these Lions were sort of hampered in any way because of these damp this sort of dental damage then they would have had a very hard time hunting so humans in the sense might have been an easy solution to their need for food [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vanderbilt University

Views: 36,690

Rating: 4.7485714 out of 5

Keywords: Vanderbilt University, Larisa DeSantis, Tsavo, Tsavo lions, man-eating lions, man-eating lions of Tsavo, Uganda Kenya railway, Nature: Scientific Reports, dental microwear, dental disease

Id: rtrvtShpmcA

Length: 2min 45sec (165 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 19 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/LadyScheibl]

I do not understand the title in relation to the video. The video was super interesting though.

[u/opal-dragon-elephant]

Animals are wicked smart man

[u/Magical__Fetus]

Now I want to watch The Ghost and the Darkness again!