Credit...Mauricio Antón
The New York Times Trilobites column has a story about baby mammoths and saber-tooth cats. A recent paper in Current Biology provides evidence of saber-tool cats preying on baby mammoths. The research looked at fossils found in suburban San Antonio, Texas.
When most people think of saber-tooth cats, they think of North America’s Smilodon. But they prowled the same terrain as another ferocious but less well-known feline, Homotherium serum, also known as a scimitar cat. While the authors compare Homotherium to a cheetah in some respects, this cat appears to have been built more for long-distance running than sprinting. Its teeth were sharp and coarsely serrated, and its fangs were shorter than Smilodon’s iconic fangs. These shorter sabers may have been better at slashing as opposed to stabbing.
“Everything that we looked at basically told us that Smilodon and Homotherium are totally different cats,” said Larisa DeSantis, the paper’s lead author and a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University. She adds that although they were more closely related than any cat species living today, “They were able to coexist in these ecosystems likely due to having very different dietary niches.”
