Man-Eating Lions: Body Count Revised

A pair of notorious man-eating lions were killed after they munched on several workers in Kenya over a months-long stretch of the building of the Ugandan Railway in 1898. The story grew to claim 135 victims. A new study suggests there may have been up to 72, though the count might have been lower.

"One of the two large male lions was getting nearly one-third of its diet from human meat, while the other about half that much," Reuters reports.

Lions prefer wild game and are generally wary of humans. They are thought to turn to people for food when other meals ar scarce and, in this case, the lions themselves may have been less than healthy and incapable of hunting properly, according to a summary of the research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

These two legendary lions were ultimately shot, but lions continue to plague people. A report in 2005 found lions killed more than 560 Tanzanians since 1990, many of them children dragged from bed. That study found that lions tended to enter villages looking for pigs that the villagers raised, but they ended up attacking people in many cases.