Field Museum scientists use X-rays to examine infamous man-eating lions to settle skull mystery

Mike Paha is the guy assigned to go into the enclosure with the man-eating lions. For the job, he pulls on white booties, like a cable TV installer. The big cats, of course, are dead. Paha does not look nervous.

What he looks like, instead, is a person enjoying the absurdity of the tableau he’s in. He is a human male in a lead-filled vest and white shoe coverings inserted into a museum diorama to hold an X-ray plate in the back of one of the lions’ heads while the machine on the outside probes it to the bone.

He clutches the wireless digital rectangle and almost smiles out toward the group of scientists, journalists, imaging technicians, even the president of the company supplying the technology, on the other side of the glass. And he holds the look, as if he is as ready to be photographed as the infamous felines.

The incongruity is kind of funny, a stark contrast to the deeds of the animals, memorialized in books and movies and in big letters on the front of their Field Museumdisplay as “The Lions of Tsavo.” It is one of the few Field dioramas in which the animals are more than just examples of their species. In 1898, as the British guided construction of a railway in Kenya, near the Tsavo River, these two lions started killing the Indian workers, some 28 in all over a 10-month period, plus, some contend, many Africans that colonial history did not bother to count.

While the animals have loomed relatively large in popular culture (the 1996 film “The Ghost and the Darkness”) and are a steadily popular attraction at the natural history museum, science has understood them in different ways through the years, and now it is trying to understand something new.

“The immediate research goal is to associate the correct skin with the correct skull,” said Julian Kerbis Peterhans, who was one of two Field researchers to discover, in 1997, the Kenyan cave where the lions were believed to have brought their human victims.

The museum bought the lions in 1924 as rugs, paying $5,000 — about $100,000 today — to British Lt. Col. John Patterson, the railway bridge engineer who first found the cave and finally was able to shoot the lions.

In addition to turning his trophies into floor coverings, Patterson wrote “The Man-eaters of Tsavo” in 1907, his account of tracking and killing the animals so he could keep building the rail line, and it became a best-seller. His book cited the Ugandan Railway account of 28 worker deaths at the hands of the lions, but he later put their toll at 135 people, factoring in, he said, their African victims.

“People kind of dismissed Col. Patterson as a big blowhard, but we’ve been able to confirm many of the details in his book,” says Peterhans, also a professor at Roosevelt University.

A 2009 study of the animals’ diets as revealed through hair and teeth analysis by other scientists, including Bruce Patterson at the Field, put the best estimate closer to 35 people. That same research suggested that the Field, for decades, had mismatched skin and skull, attributing Skull A to Body A and B to B, when it should have been the other way around. (The skulls have been displayed inside the diorama, but separately from the taxidermied lions.)

Peterhans and his co-finder of the lions’ den, Field assistant collections manager Thomas Gnoske, hypothesize that the X-rays will show that bullet wounds in one skull can be matched with imperfections in the skin, and the skull identification can return to the original order.

“That switcheroo, which we do not agree with, we’d like to get it resolved,” Peterhans says.

In the balance is pending scientific research, including a study of hair found in one lion’s tooth abscess that will provide new data on what the animals ate, Gnoske says.

“If we don’t have the association correct, we can’t publish the study on the hair,” he says.

And that attempt at proof explains why the newest Samsung portable X-ray machine, the GM85, is perched outside the Tsavo diorama in the hour before the museum opens Tuesday morning.

The $200,000 machine, which looks like a cross between an elite robo-vacuum and a specialized airport security device, is the demo unit RPS Imaging of Michigan City, Ind., a radiology equipment provider, uses to wow potential buyers such as hospitals. President Dave Price grew up in northwest Indiana coming to the Field Museum on school trips, so he says he is especially happy to be able to help out.

Gnoske wonders if the machine will be sensitive enough to show repairs in the lion skins made by the taxidermist who turned Patterson’s rugs back into lion form.

“Is it too powerful to show really fine silk thread?” he says, which is important because knowing where the skins have been sewn up could show where bullets might have penetrated.

Not to worry, Price says: “When we take X-rays with humans, you can see the sock line and the pant line.”

And as the images are taken, they display vividly on a screen on the Samsung machine. The titles typed in include “Lion 2, Lying Down” and “Skull, Test 1.”

“We’re seeing lovely images,” says J.P. Brown, Regenstein conservator of Pacific anthropology, who has come by to lend his X-ray reading expertise. “It’s really great to have the latest and greatest imaging technology.”

It’s exciting to be able to look at the lions in this new way because, he says, “These are just such iconic pieces and there’s so little documentation of what people were doing at the beginning of the 20th century. And this is a nondestructive way to document what was going on.”

Another thing that needs proving: that a third lion skull, discovered to be inside one of the mounts instead of the more typical plaster, is not from either of the man-eaters but was more likely used for convenience.

“We should be able to solve this,” says Gnoske. “The third skull mounted in there threw a monkey wrench into the machinery.”

Indeed, the third skull has well-aligned teeth, which means it is not one of the skulls in historical photographs of Patterson and his lion rugs.

Some of the images reveal the tricks of taxidermy.

“I’m really happy with these images,” says Don Falduto, RPS sales manager, who is running the machine.

“Me, too,” Gnoske says. “Some of those shots, it’s almost like modern art with all the nails in different directions.”

From there, the team will wheel the portable X-ray across the museum to photograph the skulls, which are in a backstage room. Gnoske and Peterhans are planning to have a ballistics expert in, as well, to study the bullet holes and determine entry and exit points. And they plan to look closely at the skins with a macro photo lens.

But before that happens, before the imaging team presents the Field with a thumb drive containing all the lion images to be studied in the upcoming search for wound correlations, the work inside the diorama is done, and Mike Paha emerges.

“Well, it was kind of hot with that lead thing, but I felt — careful,” says Paha, whose title is exhibits production supervisor.

He wasn’t worried about the X-ray, either. “I just didn’t go where the light was,” he says, meaning the red lines the machine emits to indicate its target.

This, of course, was not the first time the Lions of Tsavo were targeted. But this time, the aim is knowledge.

“If we can match the marks with the skull that came out of the rug,” says Gnoske, “it’s a slam dunk.”