News Anthropology A lion’s bite marks a fatal fight with a possible Roman-era gladiator Physical evidence of a fight between a Roman gladiator and a lion has been unearthed in England Researchers say they have found physical evidence of a fight between a lion and a gladiator in Roman Britain. In this illustration from the 1860s, gladiators battle tigers and lions in Rome’s Colosseum. Nastasic/digitalvision vectors/getty images By Bruce Bower 1 hour ago As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone. Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast England, provide the first physical evidence of a Roman-era battle between a gladiator and a nonhuman animal anywhere in Europe, say forensic anthropologist Timothy Thompson of Maynooth University in Ireland and colleagues. The man’s remains, which date to between the years 200 and 300, come from what may have been a gladiator cemetery in the Roman city of Eboracum, now called York, the researchers report April 23 in PLOS ONE. Bite marks on the thigh bone of a man who lived in Roman Britain, including those shown here, were likely made by a lion during a gladiator show or public execution, a new study finds.T.J.U. Thompson et al., PLOS ONE, 2025 Previous excavations found that most graves there contained men between the ages of 18 and 45, many of whom displayed injuries from violent fights. Diet-related bone chemistry tests indicated that these men had grown up in different parts of the Roman empire, perhaps before entering gladiator training. Most had been decapitated after death, a practice possibly associated with gladiator burials in Roman Britain. Written records and artworks have documented fights between armed performers and dangerous predators such as lions, leopards and tigers in Roman amphitheaters. Roman records also cite public amphitheater spectacles in which such animals maimed and killed criminals, warfare captives, Christians and others. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.