Samson was two when he went under the knife to remove the lump of bone that was compressing his brain. Later, the news of his recovery made headlines worldwide. It isn't every day that a lion has a brain op. Samson (pictured), a Barbary lion at Hai-Kef Zoo in Israel, was treated for a life-threatening skull malformation in 2005. Now it seems he is not alone. Zoos report high mortality rates in young captive-bred animals. Many of these deaths have been anecdotally linked to skull malformations. To find out whether such defects were more frequent in captivity than in the wild, Merav Shamir of the Koret School of Veterinary Medicine in Jerusalem and her colleagues compared 575 lion skulls from various collections - 512 from wild lions and 63 from lions raised in captivity.
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