Metagenomic and genomic data associated with the tooth-cavity hair and endogenous DNA of the Tsavo lions

The synergistic advancement of molecular and computational technologies has pushed genomics into a new era; nuclear genome data for phylogenomic analyses can now be sequenced from minuscule quantities of DNA (Essel et al., 2023) and from specimens that are more than a million years old (van der Valk et al., 2021). DNA analysis from hair is a well-established approach (Higuchi et al., 1988) widely used in forensic science (Bisbing, 2020) and wildlife conservation (Phoebus et al., 2020). Hair samples are largely resistant to contamination by exogenous DNA sources or can be effectively decontaminated (Gilbert et al., 2006), and can be used to identify the mammalian species from which the hair was shed (Singh et al., 2020; Meiklejohn et al., 2021). We aimed to use ancient DNA and bioinformatic methodologies (Figure 1; STAR methods) optimized for degraded DNA to systematically identify dietary prey species from hair compacted in the teeth of two Tsavo lions that lived during the 1890s in Ken..., , , # Metagenomic and genomic data associated with the tooth-cavity hair and endogenous DNA of the Tsavo lions

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2fqz612zb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.2fqz612zb)

## Description of the data and file structure

We used a four-step approach to taxonomically identify species from individual hair and hair-clumps that were extracted from tooth cavities of two lion specimens that are housed at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. Analysis of DNA from a single hair allows for the identification of a single species, while hair clumps can contain hair from multiple individuals and can therefore result in the identification of a collection of individuals and/or species. During Step 1, hair were extracted from broken lower right canines of lion FMNH 23970 and FMNH 23969. Hairs were tightly compacted in the pulp cavity of each broken canine and were carefully removed to prevent damage to the teeth. A subset of the extracted hair was used for DNA analysis (Step ...,