Suppose you had been Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson of the British Army and you'd become a national hero in 1898 by killing two man-eating lions that had halted construction of a railroad in what's now the Tsavo region of Kenya.

At the time, of course, you don't know that both lions eventually will be stuffed and become a wildly popular display at the Field Museum in Chicago, much less that you will have the singular honor 98 years later of being portrayed by the great Val Kilmer in the movie "The Ghost and the Darkness."

You're just trying to burnish your reputation a bit, so you write a book in which you claim that the lions had eaten 135 people.

The railroad company said it was closer to 28, but who's ever going to find out?

Alas, someone now has. The Nov. 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that by examining bone and hair samples from the mounted lions, and comparing them to isotopic signatures of grazing animals and Kenyan human beings of the period, scientists say the actual number of victims was about 35.

Moral of the story: Don't exaggerate.