Named in 2011 from fossils found in Brazil, Tiarajudens eccentricus was the stature of a medium dog and looked like a cross between a pig and a turtle. The oldest definitive saber-toothed animal yet found lived about 260 million years ago-and it wasn’t a carnivore. But their canines are cone-shaped, rather than thin and flat like Smilodon’s, meaning they don’t qualify as true sabertooths-the animal’s impressive yawns notwithstanding. By looking at their skulls, one might be tempted to call them saber-toothed. Many primates-from lemurs to baboons and chimpanzees-have long canine teeth. Sometimes these teeth have serrations to form a better cutting edge, but not always. “The term sabertooth refers to canines that are both long and compressed from side to side,” says Meachen. When it comes to canines, the dental details determine true sabertooths. “Canines can be used for a number of reasons,” says Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen. “Its ecology may have been very different than anything alive today-a carnivore that specialized on soft organs.” “ Thylacosmilus is not simply a marsupial version of a sabertooth cat,” DeSantis says. The kangaroo and wombat relative instead may have been more of a scavenger, perhaps using its long canine teeth to cut open carcasses and make the most of abandoned meals. But in a recent study, scientists found that Thylacosmilus probably wasn’t much of a predator at all. The marsupial relative Thylacosmilus, for example, had long fangs like Smilodon. The great predator was only the last and largest of an entire family of long-fanged cats that had been thriving for 16 million years. The hunting tactic allowed the predator to tackle large prey, such as American camels and horses, that also roamed the planet during the last glacial period, which ended about 12,000 years ago.īut Smilodon was far from the only saber-toothed beast. “Their sabers likely allowed prey to bleed out more quickly,” says Vanderbilt University paleontologist Larisa DeSantis, rather than delivering suffocating bites like modern lions. In museums, pulp novels, and films, Smilodon-meaning “knife-tooth”-is portrayed as the epitome of ferocity, using curved fangs to spill the blood of its prey across the Pleistocene grasslands of North America. This Ice Age predator, which could exceed the size of the largest living tigers, relied on incredible limb strength to grapple prey to the ground before sinking seven-inch canines into an exposed belly or throat.
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