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Close your eyes and imagine that you are face to face with a saber-toothed cat. You’ll likely see the long, curved upper canines in your frightened mind – especially ominous because those dagger-shaped teeth remained fully visible even when the cat closed its mouth.
At least for a saber-toothed cat species that was one of the most common in Earth’s ancient history, what appears in your imagination may be wrong. In The study, published last month in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, A research team argues that many artistic reconstructions of Homotherium latidens are inaccurate. Depictions of cats with ready-toothed teeth need to be revised, as the defining feature of the animal was a concealed weapon until the cat was ready to strike or otherwise open its mouth.
homotherium latidens “It was the most powerful saber-toothed cat of the Old World Pleistocene era,” said Mauricio Antón, a paleontology artist, expert on saber-toothed cats, and one of the study’s authors. According to the fossil record, Homotherium first appeared about four million years ago during the Pliocene. The species ranged from the southernmost tip of Africa to Eurasia and South America. A fossil site in Friesenhahn Cave in Texas, Homotherium groups they hunted cooperatively to take down the mammoths. The species went extinct 10,000 years ago.
The cat was the size of a lion, weighed 550 pounds, and had long, machete-shaped, serrated upper canines. In paper When Mr Antón wrote in 2009, he concluded that “the ends of Homotherium’s swords would be visible in life, extending beyond the lips”, even when the cat was at rest. In other words, Homotherium fits the stereotypical profile of the saber-toothed cat.
But more recently, Mr. Antón began to wonder if he and other paleontological researchers had misunderstood the cat’s deadly fangs.
For decades, nearly everything scientists knew about saber-toothed cats came from fossils and dissections of modern big cats. “When you examine a dead big cat, the lips are in particular position because the muscles that control the lips relax,” said Mr Antón. “This is where our data came from.”
Later in 2016, while watching a movie he made of a gorgeous, yawning male lion in the Okavango Delta, Mr. Antón noticed something he had never seen before: “The lower lip was puckering as the mouth was closing, and just before it closed, it hugged the dog’s tip. ‘He really sees this. am I?’ It was an Eureka moment.”
Mr. Antón and a team of scientists studied living big cats in detail to understand the implications of his observation. They looked at fossil dissections in what Mr Antón described as “new eyes.” And they did a 3-D CT scan of an intact, three-million-year-old fossil of a Homotherium latidens excavated in Perrier, France.
Gema Siliceo, a postdoctoral researcher at Comenius University in Slovakia and co-author of the study, said combining these techniques provides “a huge amount of information that we can use to infer the life appearance of an extinct cat.”
Their work confirmed that the lower lip and soft tissue had no room for Homotherium to fit between the upper canine and the gum. But against the closed part of the lower jaw, or chin, there was room for the canines to hide.
Regardless of their aesthetic, saber-toothed cats remained fearsome predators. Unlike modern big cats such as lions and tigers, Homotherium’s narrow, blade-like teeth were “precision weapons,” said Mr Antón. “When the swords cut through the neck arteries,” he added, “the animal would lose blood very quickly and faint within seconds.”
A lion’s upper canines are about 1.5 inches long. Homotheriums were 3 inches long. The largest saber-toothed cat, the 900-pound Smilodon fatalis, may have been 6 inches long, so the new findings don’t apply to Smilodon’s teeth: no jaw could accommodate such a tooth.
Even so, the study’s authors wonder where detective stories like this one will lead next. Dr. “We know about 30-40 species of saber-toothed cats,” Siliceo said. Even this year, scientists in China announced a previously unknown dwarf saber tooth and another jaguar size.
According to Mr. Antón, this may be just the beginning. “We have a whole biosphere in our museum drawers waiting to be discovered.”
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