Posted on 10/01/2007 6:57:03 PM PDT by blam
Sabre-toothed tiger was just a pussycat
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 02/10/2007
It may have had some of the most ferocious teeth ever seen on a mammal but scientists say that the much feared sabre-tooth tiger was actually a bit of a pussycat.
Smilodon, the sabre-tooth tiger, roamed across North and South America until 10,000 years ago
Powerfully built, with upper canines like knives, the sabre-tooth tiger was a fearsome predator of Ice-Age America's lost giants, such as bison and horses, perhaps even mammoths.
But while Smilodon ("knife tooth") may have had an impressive set of teeth, its bite was relatively weak, about one third as powerful as a lion, according to a computer re-creation of how it used its jaws.
Scientists from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the University of Newcastle in Australia used a computer-based technique normally used in the analysis of trains, planes and cars to find out what sort of forces a Smilodon skull was able to handle.
Dr Steve Wroe, a palaeontologist at UNSW, said: "For all its reputation, Smilodon had a wimpy bite. It is a bit like a moggy." But "we most certainly are not saying that Smilodon was a wimp," he told The Daily Telegraph. "It remains a truly awesome predator.
"So while our results show that its bite and skull were relatively weak, it more than made up for this with an extraordinarily powerful body and a highly specialised dental 'tool-kit'.
"You could look on it as a biological smart bomb — a balance of precision and power that enabled it to do a very dangerous job very efficiently; that is, killing big animals. Smilodon would have needed to make the killing bite only when there was no real chance of the prey moving whilst being bitten.
"This means biting only when the prey has been pinned to the ground — luckily it had the 'bear-like' build to do this, and huge claws on its 'thumbs' that would help it wrestle even bison-sized animals down to the ground."
The result was a quick kill. In contrast, lions often have to maintain a bite for many minutes to suffocate their large prey. But Dr Wroe described the lion as a "better all-rounder" in the hunting stakes.
"Smilodon was massively over-engineered for the purposes of taking small prey, but a ruthlessly efficient hunter of big game."
For the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the team compared two similarly-sized specimens; a fossilised Smilodon skull from the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, and the skull of a male lion that had lived in Taronga Zoo in Sydney.
The sabre-tooth tiger, whose fossils are found across North America and parts of South America, became extinct only 10,000 years ago. Not agile enough to catch smaller animals, it seems that it died out when its favoured large prey became rarer at the end of the most recent Ice Age.
How Smilodon used its sabres has been contentious for more than a century. Various ideas have been proposed: that the sabres were used to allow the cat to grip on to the backs of mammoths, like climbers using ice-picks, or that they were used to slice open its prey's belly.
I wouldn’t pet this “pussycat”. Those choppers look rather deadly.
Doh! Just ask Hillery! she’ll show you how they are used.
This is an idiotic headline. Anything that could kill a mammoth or short-faced bear is not to be messed with. If the sabre Tooth was still around you would see Grizzly bears run from this monster.
I tawt I taw a puddy tat!
Is it possible that those big teeth just got in the way? Just an thought...
That's not likely, given the length of time the critter survived (various species, about 3 million years). Those teeth were most likely evolved for a specific purpose, such as hunting the megafauna that coexisted with Smilodon for so long.
When those critters died out, so did Smilodon.
ping
No. As firmly anchored to the upper jaw as your teeth. (Unless you are a dentures kinda guy)...
I don’t think that it really matters that it wrestled its prey to the ground before it exposed the prey’s soft underbelly and then ripped it’s throat out.
Jack Bauer’s cat is out roaming around again....
The author doesn't mention that this coincided with the coming of humans to North America. You know, those eco-friendly Native Americans who lived in complete harmony with nature.
“Smilodon, the sabre-tooth tiger, roamed across North and South America until 10,000 years ago”
Global Warming / Bush’s fault
Apparently the Amerindians killed all of the megafauna except for the Bison, leaving the Smilodons nothing to eat (probably too slow for the Bison). They were outcompeted and had to go.
Ohhhhh, I dunno about that.
A full-grown male grizzly bear is about three times the size of one of these cats.
My money'd be on the grizz.
Remember this guy?
No. Check photos of the skull.
There have been several recent threads about a meteor over Canada some 12,900 years ago which probably engendered the Younger Dryas glacial episode and killed off both the early big game and the early big game hunters.
Check it out.
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