The artwork was destroyed during World War I. But an archaeologist’s sketch may reveal a female figure wielding a whip and facing off against a leopard, a new study suggests The archaeologist Jean Charles Loriquet created a copy of the mosaic. Alfonso Mañas / International Journal of the History of Sport under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 A researcher may have identified a depiction of a female hunter—known as a venatrix —in an ancient Roman mosaic. According to a new study published in the International Journal of the History of Sport , the 1,800-year-old artifact provides rare visual evidence of women battling wild animals. “Women fighting beasts in arena games are attested by the written sources, but no visual source is known to show their image,” writes study author Alfonso Mañas , a sports historian at the University of California, Berkeley. As such, this mosaic may be “the first and only known image of a woman fighting beasts in the Roman arena.” The mosaic was discovered in Reims, France, in 1860.…