Legendary racehorse killed by arsenic.

• Position: The Sport of Kings - Phar Lap

Phar Lap was a legendary racehorse that won many notable stakes. After his triumph in the famous Agua Caliente Handicap in 1932 in Mexico, the animal died in agony under mysterious circumstances while on tour in the U.S. One of the suggestions at the time was that Phar Lap had been poisoned. Ivan M. Kempson (Academia Sinica, Taiwan) and Dermot A. Henry (Museum Victoria, Australia) have subjected the horse's hairs to a very thorough examination, as reported in the journal, Angewandte Chemie. The animal does indeed seem to have died of arsenic poisoning.

Traces of many substances that enter the body eventually wind up accumulating in the hair, where analysis often has been used to detect drug use or to uncover posthumously poisoning as the cause of death. After he died, Phar Lap was stuffed and put on display in Museum Victoria in Melbourne. "We were able to obtain small pieces of the hide and mane with the roots intact," relates Kempson.

The researchers only examined hairs that unquestionably were still growing at the time of death. These were analyzed individually along their entire length with synchrotron X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Advanced Photo Source in Chicago. This method detects even trace amounts of chemicals because each element emits very characteristic radiation.

"We found a small amount of arsenic that was relatively evenly distributed over all of...