Posted on 11/10/2012 5:48:07 AM PST by SunkenCiv
New research has uncovered how saber-toothed cats and bear dogs managed to cohabitate peacefully more than nine million years ago.
A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Spain took tooth enamel samples from two species of sabre-toothed cats and one species of bear dog that had been unearthed at sites near Madrid.
By analyzing the enamel and determining what the animals ate, the scientists were able to understand how they lived together in a woodland region...
By analyzing what they ate, researchers surmised the leopard-sized cats and the bear dogs hunted the same prey: wild boar and horses.
However, the cats would have used tree cover to avoid encountering other bigger animals while the dogs hunted in a more open area that rarely overlapped with the cats' territory. The larger bear dogs would have no competition from the cats hunting for those same animals.
During that time, the late Miocene Period, the predators lived in a forested area that had spots of grassland.
The excavated sites in Spain, at Cerro de los Batallones, had an abundance of bones from meat-eating mammals, a situation which offers "a unique window to understand life in the past," Domingo says.
Researchers took the animals' teeth and using a dentist's drill, removed specimens from 27 saber-toothed cats and bear dogs.
Those specimens were run through a stable carbon isotope analysis, which allowed scientists to measure the ratio of carbon 13 molecules to carbon 12.
Both carbon 12 and 13 are present in the carbon dioxide plants ingest during photosynthesis. When a plant is eaten, it leaves an isotopic signature on teeth and bones.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbc.ca ...
There would be a downside for the poor fossa, but that’s the only one I see...
And All That Jazz...
Was there mass hysteria?
GMTA...
Dammit.
That joke was all I had.
/slithers away from thread
Yes, as a matter of fact, they can. This morphology stuff was however dreamed up nearly 200 years ago by a Young Earth Creationist, so it might all be bullshit.
There was some amount of hysteria, but only among these extinct cats, hence the term, cat amount.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2957899/posts?page=5#5
It’s in the caption.
I’m not sure what it looks like, but I do know it’s cryin’ all the time, and hunted boar because it never caught a rabbit.
Nice pics (as always)! The Fossa is a type of civet “cat”. :’)
My understanding is that there is still some degree of debate amongst biologists and taxonomists as to where exactly it "fits" in.
So I have to click through and actually read the article? Why can’t you just tell me if it is a Miocene-era photo or an artist’s rendering?
It’s in the caption in message one of this thread, duh! :’P
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