Latest Saber-toothed cat Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online During the Pleistocene epoch, an astounding diversity of large-bodied mammals inhabited the so-called “mammoth steppe” – a cold and dry, yet productive, environment that extended from western Europe through northern Asia and across the Bering land bridge to the Yukon territory. Three types of large predators roamed the steppe during the Pleistocene, wolves, bears and large cats. After the end of the last ice age, only wolves and...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study, led by Vanderbilt University, reveals that American lions and saber-toothed cats that roamed the North American continent in the last Pleistocene were living well off the fat of the land. The results of this study, published in PLOS ONE, were gathered from microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of these great cats recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in southern California. The study, contrary to prior analysis, did not...
The sabertooth cat (Smilodon fatalis), one of the most iconic extinct mammal species, was likely to be a social animal, living and hunting like lions today, according to new scientific research. The species is famous for its extremely long canine teeth, which reached up to seven inches in length and extended below the lower jaw.Instead of relying on the bones and teeth of the sabertooths to make their findings, scientists from UCLA and the Zoological Society of London concluded that the...
By performing sequence analysis of ancient DNA, a team of researchers has obtained data that help clarify our view of the evolutionary relationships shared by the large predatory cats that once roamed the prehistoric New World. The work is reported in the August 9 issue of Current Biology by Ross Barnett of the University of Oxford and a team of researchers from Britain, Canada, the United States, Sweden, and Australia. Toward the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago, North and...
