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.
Time to post the Firestone book which clearly explains the large animal die off around 13,000 years ago. The disaster also killed off the Clovis culture, so Amerindians were NOT responsible for end of mega fauna. I stopped at a small local museum in the mid south. They had a few large very old Clovis style spear and arrow points, but a large number of much smaller points dated around 8,000 years old. Thus it would appear it took a long time for the human population to recover quantity.
Also doesn’t this fit the Catastrophism Ping List?
I will, but this is an oldie. :^)
Flood, Fire, and Famine
in the History of Civilization
by Richard Firestone,
Allen West, and
Simon Warwick-Smith
If there is a newer study/book on this issue, I know I and I suspect others would like to see it. Thanks
the rest of the Smilodon topics:
Oh I see, I meant that the topic is an oldie.
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