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I attended a surprising lecture by zooarcheologist Michael MacKinnon on Roman games that I thought should be noted somewhere. He seems to be a lecturer for hire https://www.archaeological.org/lecturer/michaelmackinnon with immense experience digging all round the Mediterranean for animal bones from the Roman era. He finds tons of bones, but almost none of exotic animals! He shoots down most finds by other diggers (the giraffe bone in Pompei dates to recent, the bear and lion paw and tooth in north Africa was likely a skin/trophy). A few ostrich and other bones found in Italy, but not in numbers that begin to support the Roman pictures and descriptions... maybe much exaggerated! He has searched in vain for Hannibal's elephant bones... what Roman would go to the effort to relocate or burn or grind to dust bones of very large animals, especially since they don't do it for domestic animals? He has combed almost undisturbed African amphitheater sites for exotics in vain. His debunking seems all the more believable since he seems eager to prove Romans were cruel to animals. He uses circular logic in saying the Romans probably let many exotic animals die in transit "because the remainder brought a high price anyway". This seems silly to me that they wouldn't value the opportunity of making even more money by reasonable treatment. He calls the Roman trappers more cowardly than depicted in the mosaics because the mosaics show them using animal babies as bait... but that is full disclosure! He speculates the dangerous stuff was done by local Africans, but I think it was plenty dangerous for all. Read the free Amazon kindle book memoirs of someone building the Mombassa railway in 1800's who lost a worker to lions every few days. Even the overseers with (not always reliable) rifles were in terrific danger, especially because they had no reasonable spotlighting technology at night. So he appears to be saying Romans weren't often as cruel or macho as they pretend to be, at least with respect to exotic animals in games. Gladiators never fought animals, but 2 other kinds of specialists sometimes did (including doomed criminals). The lecturer seemed more believable due to his bias against animal cruelty... I am a vegetarian, but found him almost at the witch-hunter extreme. P.S. on the way to this lecture I listened to another debunking lecture recording about holy land archeology. A women with some of the most experience digging or writing up digs in Masada claims Josephus accounts were likely fictionalized. In a 36 lecture series, she says several of the mass suicide accounts of Josephus have no archeo basis,,, that is, the well known evidence is otherwise explainable. Furthermore Josephus had several motivations to depict dramatic suicides, and his readers expected him to selectively fictionalize for dramatic effect. I forget the lecturer's name, but possibly more evidence for my withful thinking that the Romans were nicer folks than commonly depicted! P.P.S this site won't let you log on if you override the 2 tick box defaults.