What if massive saber-toothed cats roamed the Inland Northwest? inlander.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from inlander.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Machairodus lahayishupup could easily have taken on prey weighing several tons.
To identify the new saber-toothed cat species, Orcutt, who is now an assistant professor of biology at Gonzaga University, and Calede painstakingly investigated the forearm bones of lions, jaguars, tigers, and other modern big cats to determine whether their elbow shapes could reliably differentiate one species from the next.
“We found we could quantify the differences on a fairly fine scale,” Calede says in a press release. “This told us we could use the elbow shape to tell apart species of modern big cats.”
Then they turned to the fossil record, examining the same morphological markers on the museum specimens.
According to a research paper published last week in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, this new-found specimen provides clear evidence for a diverse range of predator fauna existing during the late Miocene of the continent that included some of the biggest felids in Earth s history.
Credit: Roger Witter
The sabre-toothed cat was part of an early evolutionary branch that went extinct roughly 10,000 years ago, where today s house cats are an entirely different evolutionary offshoot that emerged later. Sabre-toothed cats, similar to lions, were quite social animals that hunted for their meals and existed amongst other members of the same species.
May 03, 2021 05:50 PM EDT
Scientists reported on May 3, 2021, in a new study, a giant saber-toothed cat inhabited North America (Columbus, Ohio) between 5 million and 9 million years ago, weighing about 900 pounds and capturing prey that possibly weighed 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.
(Photo : Getty Images)
Identification of the Cat s Fossils
The researchers finalized a meticulous comparison of seven fossil specimens that are uncategorized with formerly recognized fossils and samples of bone from around the world to describe the new species. Their discovery makes a case for using the elbow portion of the humerus - adding to the teeth - to have an identification of large saber-toothed cats fossils whose huge forearms enabled them to conquer their prey.