Saber-toothed cats kept the world green…

wv wrote:

The article didnt make it clear. Were the big tigers pack animals or did
they hunt alone? If they hunted in packs i would think they could indeed
bring down the big full-grown Mammoths.

On Game of Thrones there was clear evidence that Mammoths could be stopped
by shooting flaming arrows at their rectums. Seems to me, a pack of Smilodons
with arrows could probably bring down a fullgrown Mammoth. Just speculating, of course.

w
v

There were many species of saber-toothed cats but none of them were closely related to modern big cats, so ‘saber-toothed tiger’ is a misnomer.

There is no direct evidence for pack hunting in Smilodon but some of their bones have been found with crippling injuries that had partially healed. Hard to explain how a solitary Smilodon with a debilitating injury could survive long enough for the bone to heal unless it was being cared for. For that reason it is believed they were probably pack hunters. But that’s not certain.

Smilodon’s body was about a foot shorter than a modern lions and it had a bob tail ta boot. So it wasn’t very long. However, it was about twice as heavy as a modern lion. It was a really powerful stocky animal that wasn’t very fast so it probably was an ambush predator. But given it’s hyper-powerful build and saber teeth, it was certainly a very different type of hunter than any modern cat. They’ve tried to determine how or even *if* they used those long fangs when hunting. There was a school of thought that said the fangs would be prone to breaking if the Smilodon bit into a big, struggling animal like a camel or horse let alone a mammoth. So some paleontologists actually thought the teeth were primarily for display. However, now they think that the Smilodon used it’s powerful body to wrestle the prey item to the ground and once subdued, finished it off with its saber teeth. They’ve done studies that show that given the Smilodon’s wide gape, if it bit the underside of a horse’s neck then the saber teeth would be aligned perfectly to penetrate the thick muscle and cut the poor animal’s windpipe. But of course, the prey would have to already be subdued to allow for this. Modern big cats do this as well. They’ll hold the animal down while clenching the animals throat in their mouth, compressing the windpipe until the animal suffocates. Smilodon would have done this much more efficiently because it wasn’t just compressing the windpipe – it was cutting it into several pieces. Death was comparatively quick and painless.

Stone knapping and tool use isn’t known among any saber-toothed cats and Smilodon most likely couldn’t make fire because its lack of opposable thumbs would prevent it from striking a match.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by nittany ram.

wv wrote:

As every well-read first grader knows, The fossil record suggests,
many of them wore corsets. Which is just plain weird. Still, one doesnt
argue with the fossil record.

w
v

True.

And apparently they were bipedal.