I just wanted to take a second to praise your excellent subtitles. I am deaf and the usual autogenerated UA-cam subtitles get completely lost with scientific nomenclature. Thanks to proper subtitles, I can enjoy your awesome content all the more. I wish more content creators took the time to do this.
And relatively simple to add your script in during the editing process. There is really no excuse for not doing this on any relatively scripted production.
Yes although I found that it can be a real pain in the butt on occasion. But yes usually it's just a matter of fleshing out your script and uploading it as a text file
Felids seem particularly predisposed to adopting the saber tooth model. Today, tigers of course have rather long canines as well, but the mainland clouded leopard takes the cake as the cat with the longest canines relative to body size. It seems to me that it's specifically arboreal or semi-arboreal ambush predators that go down this path. Me personally, I'd like to see a mustelid have a crack at it!
*prey animals evolve larger body size* Dinosaurs: get larger in response Pseudosuchians: get larger in response Chondrichthyes: get larger in response Synapsids: *BIG TEEF*
@@RealPaleontology I do want to say, you are incorrect about one thing, perhaps two... There are a few species of mammals that have saber teeth today. Not used in the same way as hunting per se, but they do have elongated canines. Walrus, they have saber teeth. And muntjac or similar tusked deer. They aren't prehistoric animals. But they do have saber like teeth
Elephant tusks are elongated incisor teeth. So when the sabertooths fought woolly mammoths it was a battle between the canines and incisors. (Yet no canids were involved.)
I’ve known there were a couple of sabretooth tigers, but had no idea that there were that many, nor did I know they evolved quite a number of times, never mind getting bigger each time and then dying out. Thanks so much. And well stated with great pictures. You said so much in a calm way, in a short time, without rushing. Perfect lecture. :) 🐆🐅🌷🌱
Awesome video once again on my favorite predators. I really appreciate that you take the time to address every new research paper that gets published. Thank you
I hadn’t thought of the cycle as a ratchet, but it’s an excellent analogy. I am reminded of a professor who told us to draw a triangle and label each point of the triangle as competition, disturbance, and stress. He said every species of plant falls somewhere within the triangle, with highly competitive plants outcompeting the others during stable periods in the ecosystem. Routine but sporadic disturbances such as wildfire in pine forests favored species that could handle regular hyper-intense but not constant environmental stress. Stress-based species were highly specialized to take advantage of environments or niches where more competitive species simply couldn’t survive, such as high -salinity and other extremophile systems. Generalists are typically good competitors with basic stress and disturbances tolerances, leaning more towards competition than anything else but still hovering around the middle of the triangle. While this model doesn’t perfectly translate to animals, I think it is useful to highlight the saber tooth design’s strengths and weaknesses. The saber tooth is a strong competitor because it can take advantage of a huge and otherwise (nearly) unreachable resource relatively easily. I would also argue that it’s highly stress-tolerant as having a large number and density of megafauna is a type of environmental stress both physically and mentally (just look at how much more uneasy lions are than grey wolves). However, this high degree of specialization makes them very poor disturbance species, unable to adapt to a shift away from their preferred megafauna prey. I have learned so much from you, both since I found your channel and over the years as I have read your papers. Thank you so much
There is a lot of evidence of sabers striking skulls of other predators, And that kinda counts as last resort. I only know of 2 cases of sabers striking bone of a prey animal and one of them may not be from sabers. Also good video.👍
Fascinating video - very relaxed, too. The pace gave time to take it all in and think, while listening. Some video presenters rush, and talk so fast that you have to watch bits again in order to make sense of what they’re saying. This gives food for thought generally, about specialist adaptation in fauna of all sizes, and all while watching and listening. Just about perfect presentation. Thank you.
Hey Professor I dunno if you take video requests, but would you consider making a video on Barbourofelis? And perhaps barbourofelids in general? The level of convergence this animal has with the dirk-toothed cats is mind-blowing to me and the simple fact they are the most extreme in terms of saber-toothed adaptations makes their lack of research and public attention surprising to me. They are really cool animals that i’d like to learn more about but papers are seriously limited
I read this paper a short timer ago, and this video is an excellent summary. What I liked about both is noting the significance of the variations in sabertooth morphologies and their implications for niche separation with regard to prey species, and thus differences in ecological or habitat preferences. It struck me that this was another example of seeing something that has been under our noses for a very long time, but nobody looked closely enough until now.
Yes, I totally agree. For decades people have focused largely on the big sexy more specialised species (me included). But certainly, in recent years there have been a number of far more comprehensive treatments looking at the full gamut of variation. And yes, there are multiple incidents of coexistence among different species of sabertooth. It’s also interesting to consider the steps that haul a lineage through the evolutionary ratchet. A good start might be more information on the killing behaviour of species of potentially incipient sabertooths, i.e., the two species of clouded leopard. Unfortunately, they are as notoriously reclusive as they are beautiful to behold.
I am currently readin "Sabertooth" my Mauricio Anton, its a fantastic book going in depth into the topics mentioned in this video. But i assume you have probably already read it, since i saw some illustrations from the book in the video here.
I got my PHD at the University of New South Wales, University of New England in Armidale and Flinders in Adelaide and the only two in Australia that offered degrees in paleontology,
There's actually a good argument to be had regarding the clouded leopard being considered a still existing saber toothed cat, as their upper canine teeth almost go past the lower jaw when fully closed.
Yes, my colleague Per Christiansen wrote a paper on this in 2006 I think it was. Did you know there are now two species of clouded leopard generally recognised
Highly specialized carnivores are the first to go when environmental changes happen. The Pleistocene transitioning into the Holocene epoch happened so fast that many of the pleistocene mega fauna couldn't adapt fast enough.
Excellent video, have just started watching your videos and it's lovely to see real paleontologists/zoologists come on platforms like this to talk Something I've always wondered is how would this specialized morphology (like relatively fragile upper canines) affect intraspecific combat in, let's say smilodon?
That's an interesting question. I would guess for now that although intraspecific combat does occasionally lead to the death of one of them, and sometimes serious injury to one or both, they combatants really try to avoid anything too prolonged. This is because such altercations are usually over mates or territory, and one of the animals is likely to give up and get away before too much damage is done; after all, predators need to be in relatively good shape and intact to successfully feed themselves and get more chances at finding a mate. Death do occur, of course, but I think they are the exception. So, whatever sabertooths did in this "arena", I suspect it probably didn't involve much use of those sabers. Perhaps a lot of snarling, display behavior, and perhaps clawing. That's just my guess.
@@8888Rik Lack of sexual dimorphism suggests that they would be less aggressive than modern and extinct panthera (like atrox) in intraspecific combat There is a specimen with a hole in it's skull, thought to be due to a fight with a smilodon, but if biting into bone is a last resort, I wonder how that battle might have played out I agree, most modern felids always start the fight off with vocal aggression and they fight prolonged for 30-ish seconds before taking a break and resorting to that again, and smilodon was apparently even less aggressive than that, so I'd say that trying to subdue something likely equally tough as you to try to get a good, SAFE bite in is pretty damn difficult
@@crosforussolos Yes I agree, and I think that if that cranial puncture was indeed from a saberooth, it was a rare, one-off kind of event. Your point about a lack of discernible sexual dimorphism brings up an interesting point, which is exactly what kind of social structure they had. I side with the folks who suspect that they were in fact living in groups somewhat like "prides", bt the only extant social cats, lions, shown significant sexual dimorphism, and this figures significantly into their overall social behaviors. To me, this suggests that lion prides are not a reliable model for sabertooth "prides" or social groups. Maturing males were presumably forced out for obvious reasons that would also apply to sabertooth social groups, but beyond that, the comparison would seem to break down.
Really interesting channel with high quality content! (commenting for better visibility as i've got this video suggestion rather unexpected but really happy to get it )😊
@RealPaleontology unfortunately have not much friends interesting in the paleontology - i'm IT and all my surroundings is IT, family included 🙃 but i will send link to my son - he is master grade student in computer science and looking around for the field of research
The sabertooth body plan lives on in the cloudrd leopard at least. I checked before leaving this and for it's size, the canines on these guys are pretty impressive. I'm not saying the two cats are related at all (I didn't look that hard) but at minimum there's a convergence between them.
It is most comforting to note that humans have little to fear from Sabertoothed Tigers, what with our being so agile and not being a big lumbering species. I can rest comfortably tonight.
03:18 I thought the summary said that once a biter goes down a saber tooth path, it seems good at first but then gets out of control and the biter disappears. I can't help but wonder if the same pattern exists with Dimetrodon and Inostrancevia. I know the pattern exists with internet communication methods like Yahoo groups, MySpace, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Those all start out well and then get too extreme. The rest of your talk was describing how that worked with saber teeth. (Does Inostrancevia have a broken hip like the one you displayed in 09:28? I have a hip like that, a week in intensive care.)
Yes good point, I haven't looked into this in detail with respect to gorgonopsians. They really are quite different in many respects to mammalian sabertooths.At a think there is any evidence of hip dysplasia in Inostrancevia
This may be off-topic, but when describing the "evolutionary ratchet" and the trade-offs between a saber-toothed canine vs. agile prey I was suddenly thinking of the combat tactics of the Roman Cavalry vs. the Greek Hoplites Saber-toothed cats and Greek Hoplites: specialized for slow-moving attacks and defensive attacks Agile prey and Roman Cavalry: fast-moving and highly capable of better defending themselves
Great video, thank you. I never bought the theory that the *sole* reason sabertooth cats keep "failing" is that the teeth are too fragile and break. If that was the case, surely the evolutionary advantage would not have led to the more extreme versions in the first place, due to natural selection. Clearly, fragile or not, the sabreteeth were supremely effective. The idea that the _rest of the cat_ also has to adapt in very specialised ways and that being so extremely powerful (and heavy) ambush predators rather than being capable of pursuit hunting would have limited them if the megafauna prey the specialised in went scarce seems to me to be far better as an explanation.
I think the point is not that the teeth are too fragile for the job they're designed for, that is to kill large list agile prey. This together with a range of other adaptations renders them less will adapted to take smaller prey. When population densities of large prey fall below a critical threshold it means that the sabre cats have nowhere to go. They are too specialised.
Wonderful video thank you!!!! There used to be a lot of conjecture about how the hell sabretooths even managed to feed themselves with a pair of massive canines at the front of their mouths - they looked like a barrier to getting anything in them, but obviously they managed. I have a very vague recollection of it being surmised somewhere they were pretty dependent on drinking blood! When I was fifteen I watched the film Quest for Fire in which they got a couple of lions with phoney big teeth to stand in for sabretooths and as fitting fake teeth couldn't have been an easy job I suspected they must have tried leaving them on when feeding the lions during the shoot. So what happened? A bit of an accidental opportunity for 'experimental' palaeontology perhaps. Years later in the book 'The Velvet Claw' there was actually a reference to a film where they found lions with phoney sabres fed perfectly well with them in - I'm 99% certain it must have been Quest for Fire. A dam shame I think that a bit more isn't made of this incident, it's instructive and a bit of a 'fun' story. Thanks again, sabre teeth like large, armoured terrestrial animals are an evolutionary constant missing from the present, a crying shame.
Hey thanks a lot. I remember that movie it was quite entertaining at the time! It is a crying shame the same tooths are gone. But hey we do have a frozen saber to us now, who knows maybe they will be back
I have a question regarding the sabers of these big cats; where they always exposed? One of the arguments for large carnivorous theropods like T. rex having lips covering their teeth is that they would keep them moist at al time as teeth can dry out if left exposed to the air for long periods of time. With this in time, how did the various sabretooth cat genera and species keep their teeth moist, especially ones like Smilodon that had long sabers but short chins? And is there any talk about the sabertoothed cats with the long chins forming a fleshy pocket for keeping their canines moist?
Yes there has been research on this. Certainly for homotherium it has been the strongly suggested that the sabres were concealed so to speak. However this doesn't seem to be the case for Smilodon
I would love to watch a video about those enormous chin protrusions that so many sabertooth hunters had. I find it intuitive to think that they supported fleshy pouches for the teeth or at least large elongated chops of some kind that could wrap around the canines. And yet, the majority of paleoart completely ignores this and just shows animals like Thylacosmilus with bare saber teeth and a weird boomerang chin that has no specialized function whatsoever.
One question I'd have for your expertise on the subject is do the fossils show structural evidence of the larger sabre teeth which might have lacked 'pockets' to keep the tooth moisturized and protected had more tusk like construction in fossils such as those of tusked pigs or the like. As I recall from childhood fascination at least, animals like Smilodon may have not had the protective tooth 'pockets' of earlier sabre toothed predators, and this raises the matter of how do they not experience rot?
This is a good question. There has been some work done on it. It's very likely that Homotherium kept its canines as concealed carry so to speak. Personally I think it's very likely that many other species did too, especially those with shorter canines. But this seems unlikely for Smilodon. Of course, as you know a number of living species appear to do just fine with exposed teeth or tusks. Although clearly as you suggest keeping them moist would be ideal.
@@RealPaleontology I wonder in case of smilodon that the sabre teeth being unprotected put a permanent cap upon its lifespan beyond usual organ failure/old age causes. Some pack mammals do support disabled members, but it's not surefire and maimed lions still often die even if they recover from their wounds. How certain is it that gum-pockets for teeth existed on species anyway, or rather how can we be certain a fossilized species *didn't* have such tooth protections. Do they usually have distinct anchors on the mandibles, or is it something only discernible through tissue impressions on fossils?
I am glad you asked! Theoretically, this may have put a cap on their lifespan. Of course, the fact that mammals only have two generations of teeth puts a cap on us all! In real life though it’s pretty unlikely that many males in particular survive beyond the age of 10. Certainly, very few male lions live beyond this in the wild and I think 14 pretty much the maximum. Females typically live a couple of years longer. And, yes, there is pretty compelling evidence that Smilodon at least was a social animal. A paper was published a few years ago demonstrating profound hip dysplasia that had clearly survived many months and perhaps years beyond the time of injury. It’s difficult to imagine how this could have happened without some kind of support network!
Short answer, we don’t know in the vast majority of cases. One thing we can be sure of is that the frozen Homotherium cub recently found in Siberia did not have stripes.
Since I was a child I was always facinated by "saberthooths". Why would such a predator need such big canides? Yeah they can dig deeper, but they are also easier to break, makes harder to open the jaw for a large bite and they are also extra weight. I wish they could do similar experiments but focus on its capacity to hook itself into flesh and tear it. I feel his morphology is specially inclined to hook itself into a large prey and hold itself on to it. A specialized animal to hunt large prey, striking them from below where you have less bones (belly, under the neck, the sides of the belly, etc) and hold itself either until the animal bleed out, or they get pulled out tearing a large wound on the prey.
I think a really important component is how would a predator access large prey especially if not a pack hunter without these. If they're pushed into the niche that's the best nature can come up with and that's that. Still I'd like to consider the world if we were in the other half of the ouroboros, where instead of the age of smaller generalists it was larger specialists. Even if that's antithetical to human stewardship. It eats us? We don't usually suffer it to live.
Yeah, got to get around to fixing that. Problem is it’s a lovely old home and it’s difficult to find a suitable door knob. Might I suggest trying to focusing on the marsupial lion passed to your upper right.
@@RealPaleontology Lol, ugly buggers weren't they? Convergent evolution is more common than most people realise, and it's fascinating that certain body-forms reappear again and again throughout history, with the 'crab-form' by far the most successful.
Such as Smilodon i imagine it holding on to the front of a large prey animal and once the teeth were buried into the fleshy throat area, using those neck muscles to pull back and forth like a dog holding onto a rope toy, therefore the blade being used just as a carving knife through a beef joint. Its can jump off then because the damge would be horrendous. I think the sheer amount of predator competition at the time would possibly lead to this assassination technique. Just my thoughts, sounds cool to me though. Thankyou for your videos and sharing your knowledge my friend.
Answer: we don't know why Panthers survived & Machairodonts didn't. Adaptations that specialized in large prey likely made them unable to cope with the Bolling-Alerod & Younger Dryas, like Homotherium experienced; however, their decline began earlier than that in some places. Personally, I think it just came down to raw numbers, this is the nature of competition in nature. The lineages that fail to get the edge on another in the same niche will dwindle until they fade into history, many such cases.
Yup, it is of course a numbers game. But I have to say that the extinction of Homotherium remains enigmatic to me. It certainly is very unusual for such a widespread taxon to bite the dust. But of course, Big specialised apex predators are always particularly vulnerable to extinction because they can never occur in anything but very low densities.
Thanks again for your lucid explanation. Somewhere I had seen the Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa) presented as a living sabre-toothed cat and when I just checked at Wiki, the canines on the skull image certainly looked impressive, but clearly conical and not flattened like a true sabre-tooth (more an estoc-toothed perhaps). The Wiki page also has an image with a pretty impressive gaping mouth, though. Has anyone studied how the Clouded Leopard kills its prey?
I actually have the cast of clouded leopard skull in my office. Unfortunately there's very little information on how they kill their prey. A very reclusive animal.
Something cool involving paleontology in your native Australia Remember how I was talking about the creatures of the ordovician? Something in your country might have to do with that Extinction event. The ordovician mass extinction was caused by glaciers and scientists found something in the southeast of Australia that they think might be a catalyst. It's a buried ring structure and magnetic anomaly which has tentative characteristics of an asteroid impact, it's 300 miles across and due to how buried it is is estimated to be between 525-417 million years old, which place is it roughly the time of the mass extinction which happened to 445 Mya. Identification is not conclusive yet analyzing drill samples is necessary, but if it's true it'll be significant. The theory is that global cooling from this possible impact might have been the shot in the arm that triggered the glaciation and in turn the mass extinction. If this is the case then the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is now outclassed in its body count
@@RealPaleontology and bear in mind with my wording it's not absolutely certain if it's an impact crater or responsible for the mass extinction That will be certain until drill samples are analyzed
Sounds to me, that these cats with such huge teeth likely (much like the lion and Cape buffalo) launched attacks to wear the bigger prey down over time. Not killing them quickly. I think the teeth rather than being for maximum damage, it may actually just be for keeping ahold of prey long enough to have effectively worn them to exhaustion. Yes severe blood loss would result, but we don’t really know how these attacks actually would have played out. I just see what big cats Do now and imagine it’s just the same type of behaviour and in a different scale it would also explain all the damage done to the torso and lower back. Hanging onto a giant, being whipped around all the while up against trees and such.
When I was in the 3rd grade, I had an idiot teacher who actually told us that SabreToothed cats were extinct because they "starved to death because they had trouble eating". Considering how beneficial these teeth were and how much they reappeared through convergent evolution, her silly theory seems even more ridiculous!
I am not denying the concept of the evolutionary ratchet. It certainly seems very interesting. But I think any honest attempt to answer (why aren't there any sabertooth cats today) has to start at "humans". If it weren't for the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, there would almost certainly still be sabertooth cats in North America and possibly Eurasia. I don't think we can boame the evolutionary ratchet for their dissapearance. I'd even say that any attemp to draw evolutionsry patterns should be careful with including the Holocene, since at the very least everyone should admit that there is a significant chance that modern humans drastically impacted those ecosystems. Maybe I'm too nickpicky. You did mention that the dissapearance of Megahervibores probably caused their extinction. I just thought that it was important to mention how unprecedented this extinction was in terms of bodymass selectivity, and thus why it doesn't seem a good period to study this pattern of evolution and extinction.
The sad fact is that we can almost never tease apart the relative significance of different extinction drivers in living species. Although, human influence is almost always the prime driver in the here and now. Regarding megafaunal extinction, multiple papers come out every year claiming to have resolved the issue. Some putting it on humans others putting it on climate. It's been this way for many decades. I can't see this changing. And that's why to be honest that I have largely stood back this.
Great video! Really interesting stuff! My question about the more extreme sabertooth species is: how did the size of their canines affect their ability to consume their large prey? Did the use them to, for want of a better term, cut their prey into more manageable chunks, or did they use their molars to chew bits off? What does the evidence point to here?
That's a really good question. The consensus view is that the sabre teeth would not have greatly impeded their ability to consume their prey. Where did they actually used them to carve up the meat is something that's not being much discussed. But you're right I think it should. It has been argued that Thylacosmilus used its canines to open the belly of its prey. You could watch my video on that. But otherwise I don't think much has been said
@RealPaleontology Thank you for your reply ☺️ It seems to me that it would make more sense, at least for the species with the extreme canines, to not even use their lower jaw during their attack. If the muscles in their lower jaws were weak, then it seems plausible that simply digging their canines into their prey, then using their neck muscles to rip, without even opening their mouth would get the job done just as well as with getting their lower jaws involved in the process... Obviously I'm not thinking about the ones with the "Hapsburg chin" here... Maybe opening the jaws was done to simply get it out of the way, rather than risking damage to the lower jaw? Is the evidence for the extent that the jaws could open fairly settled, or is there still some debate?
@@RealPaleontology Thanks! The gap between tip of the canines and lower jaw at full gape is what's throwing me... It's such a small distance, compared to the full extent of the opening.
Yes, I know what you mean. Remember that when the cat drives those canines in it's not pushing them straight down, but rotating its head around the neck joint
The sabretooth niche is currently full of snakes, so I don't blame mammals for being hesitant to jump back in! While it's unlikely that any new sabretooths will evolve in these parts during the next few decades, de-extinction of pre-existing species (or reasonably convincing attempts) may not be so far away. I wonder why they didn't simply dominate the kills of less dangerous predators, when their own prey became scarce. Perhaps they weren't good at fighting other super-predators, meaning they needed to make a lot of kills for themselves, because scavengers would quickly drive them away and claim the spoils. A sad end for these majestic slayers.
I want your opinion on a theory of mine There was a Permian non mammalian synapsid called anteosaurus, it was a 5 m 600 kg Hunter The same guy who described the African inostrancevia also studied Anteo, but never stated what it's killing method was. Anteosaurus apparently had a powerful bite but the teeth behind the canines were kind of reduced, normally if a predator kills by bite force that has big post canine teeth to make effective use of that bite force, but anteosaurus didn't. Although its canine teeth were big they were more similar proportionally to that of a big cat rather than to a sabre tooth. The canine teeth didn't interlock either, this is important. In many shearing hit-and-run predators like xenosmilus, inostrancevia and hyaenodon, the canines interlock which grants a scissor-like cutting motion and helps them sheer off meat. Because this adaptation is ubiquitous across synapsids across the family tree, I would expect anteosaurus to be no different but it doesn't have interlocking canines. Its skull bones are also heavily thick and ossified now it's a dinocephalian, the members of that family were designed were designed to headbutt each other and anteosaurus was no different. but those same adaptations to resist stress of head-butting behavior could also help the skull resist stress of a struggling prey item. It's my opinion anteosaurus probably killed prey like a big cat, biting the throat and suffocating it to death. We already see so many other proto mammals converge on modern-day mammals I suppose a convergence with big cats was only inevitable. What do you think?
@@RealPaleontology I love it although it needs to be said inostrancevia had coexisted with rubidgine gorgonopsians in Africa because we have fossils of inostrancevia from Tanzania which date to the wuchiapignian epoch, the peak of the rubidgines It didn't just migrate to Africa because of the crap going down in Siberia it had already been in Africa before the Siberian traps
Thanks! The dating on that single Tanzanian pre-maxilla is not universally accepted. And who said it migrated because of the crap going down in Siberia? Incidentally, this wasn't a migration, but a range expansion.
The point at the end makes me wonder why Homotherium went extinct when it's endurance hunting body plan could have theoretically allowed it to go after smaller prey like wolves or hyenas could. Maybe them being diurnal put them into direct competition with more flexible predators like lions (who can theoretically partition by hunting at night) and especially humans?
I don't think the sabertooths was able to open up their mouth wide enough to bite anything with their saber tooths. So what's the point of having saber tooths anyway, beside of punching holes in paper ?
I guess all sabertooth predators had their elongated canines covered with soft tissue. That could be extended lower jaw od extended upper lips or a combination of both. It is obviously noticed in a case of Thylacosmilus, less obvious in Homotherium and the least obvious in the case of Smilodon. If Smilodon did not have the extended bone tissue in lower jaw, then it must have something else; an extended skin, a skinny poach or possibly a cartilage scabbard. Why should be a soft tissue an necessity ? Simply because a long teeth exposed to the air, cold, heat and other elements would make a long tooth even more bridle that it already was. My personal experiment. Years ago I exposed my wisdom tooth to the elements and dag it into an ant colony to clean and preserve it. After two months it became so bridle that I only threw it away. Now imagine a sabertooth that lives in heat or cold or dry enviroments. I think that teeth absolutely need a protection with similar body temperature and a constant moisture of saliva. And one even more radical idea... I also wish to add that imagination of sabertooths gaping jaw resembles me to a gaping jaw of venomous snakes or some large spiders.... and I would not be wonder if there were also a case of.... venom ? No need to kill a prey animal instantly, but to bite, follow and wait like a comodo dragon should be quite a rational option. And then after stalking and waiting they deliver a fatal bite on the neck. After all many of the species had a body build as a persistent stalkers. It is unlikely to prove that "venom hypothesis" and we will probably never know that for sure.... except maybe once through the DNA of recently discovered Homotherium ????
The current thinking on this is that sabertooths with well-developed phalanges on their lower jaws probably did where there canines as ’concealed carry’. Smilodon probably not.
I still can't wrap my head around how these animals bit anything larger than a carrot. Even if those heads opened 180 degrees, the gap between the teeth and the bottom jaw don't seem big enough. Plus, how common was it for them to pump the front edge of their giant teeth while trying to bite an animal and breaking it? or if an animal struggled with those giant teeth in its flesh? the leverage on those teeth would be massive wouldn't it? Especially on the tip. They aren't even conical and thick, but relatively slender.
Yeah, and can see how you think that. But we know they definitely did it. There are various confirmed instances of these sabres being driven through bone, including into the skulls of other sabretooths.
Yes this is the trade off! And yet it's at morphology that has real evolved time and time again. The bigger they are the more effective they are, but the bigger they are the more likely they are to break. It really is a wonderful example of what we call an evolutionary trade off
Coʻuld the two specis of Clouded Leopard be the next preceding or precursor animals from where the next abertooth animals evolved from? The original idea was not minem
Yes, this suggestion was proposed by Per Christiansen back in 2006. Incidentally, I published a paper with him on bite force in mammalian carnivores in 2007.
Sorry if this is an ignorant comment, but since the sabertooths disappear when large prey become too scarce, shouldn't they still be frequent in areas in which elephants are still roaming, like parts of Africa and India? Or even there their numbers are too small?
That's not a silly question at all. I think the point is though that that populations have been squeezed through bottlenecks at times of climatic extreme. The predators are more likely to go extinct then they're prey especially if we are talking about highly specialized predators like sabertooths. Consequently the prey population can survive and replenish. But the predator is extinct
I suspect this is going to sound simple minded, but: If a large sabertooth is forced to prey on smaller animals, then the broad sweep of its 'sabers' are more likely to go past the windpipe and jugular arteries and catch upon the cervical spine. This is more likely to damage its narrow canines. Of course that assumes it's going for the throat. The rib cage and hind legs pose a problem when going for the stomach, but the prey would have to kick forward with the hind legs to protect its belly. (So take the legs out first?)
Not a silly question at all! And yes, this would have made processing small prey or difficult. But I think the real issue is that all of the postcranial adaptations that typically come with the big sabertooth design package make it increasingly unlikely that they could have caught small, agile prey in the first place.
Maybe in 15 million years in Australia the giant sabertoothed offspring of the feral cats of today will hunt the offspring of the feral camels of today.
Thank as always very interesting as always it does to another question. "Climate Change," human hunting and the evolution of vampire bats development of its relationship with the Rabies as well as the development of relationship between Little Brown Fire Ant, a.k.a. Electric Ant (Wasmannia auropuntata) and the disease Keratopathy, specificly Florida Keratopathy can explain the elimination of large herbivores in South America while "Climate Change" and human hunting possibility explaining the elimination of Cave Bears, Woolly Rhinoceroses and Mammonths in North Asia, as well as human hunting explains the absence of large marsupials in Austrailia, therefore elimination sabertoothed animals. It doesn't explain the loss of sabertoothed animals in North America where bison, moose, as well as large deer and large bear still exists. Nor does human hunting and "Climate Change" doesn't the loss of big animals doesn't explain the loss of large animals anywhere except Australia and New Zealand as large animals existed in abundance everywhere else except South America where animal-related diseaes (Rabies and Keratrophy) could also have been the crucial factor. Some other factor had to cause the extinction of the last sabertoothed animals due to previous sabertoothed animal were still in an abundance when later toothed animals evolved. My deduction or assumption.
Well this is of course a highly contentious and hotly debated question. My conclusion, it will never, ever be fully resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s why I like to concentrate on questions that can be resolved. And the one thing we now know for sure is that the blitzkrieg hypothesis is dead.
There is evidence of neanderthal's hunting cave lions. But I don't think that humans hunting sabertooths was likely a major extinction driver. Your second suggestion carries more weight I think.
Funnily enough there's little evidence of tooth decay. Even in our own species OK doesn't really become common until agriculture takes hold over the last 10,000 years or so.
Interesting! But of course it would be difficult to get funding for such a project. Maybe I should set up a go fund me page and see if we can't get it done!
@@RealPaleontology I don't have to "imagine". It's right there in my genetic memory with the shape of spiders, the feel of a tittay in my mouth, and the smell of death. 🌪️💥🤷👻
Yes, poor beasts probably died out last but thats how it goes as the prey dies off. What about north american bobcat and lynx, teeth aren't the same but body style is very similar
Funnily enough it almost certainly died out before its prey did. This is typically what happens with big carnivores Once the density of their favoured prey drops below a sustainable point
@@RealPaleontology my high school mascot lol. I made the comment to see if any of my classmates were watching. I hope I didn’t upset you. We had a big statue, of a saber tooth tiger in front of our auditorium.
Is it safe to assume that saber-toothed cats had some kind of pouch to cover their teeth like Thylacosmilus? Wouldn't the teeth become brittle without the protection of the saliva and lip tissue, or were those teeth like crocodile teeth, and they were adapted to be constantly exposed to air, like they're depicted in most paleontological art? Also, what do you think of the clouded leopard, (Neofelis nebulosa)? Could it be called the closest modern approximation of a "saber-toothed" cat because of its tooth to body size ratio? They aren't related to Smilodons, but they have the longest canine teeth relative to body size of all the extant cats.
We're pretty sure that some such as homotherium most likely did have their teeth as concealed weapons. We're also pretty sure that some such a Smilodon did not
@@RealPaleontology Thanks for answering! That's really awesome how the species varied. I have always wondered that about Smilodons and other saber cats.
No worries. Mauricio Anton published a paper on this in 2022. He concluded that most or all sabertooths with well-developed phalanges on the lower jaw probably concealed their sabre teeth. This would include subspecies with particularly large canines, such as Thylacosmilus and Barbourofelis.
Could you give some reasons as to why especially mammals are predisposed to develop sabre teeth (ranking synapsids as mammals for convenience sake for this comment)? Could it be that there undiscovered sabre toothed reptiles? What's your opinion on the phenomenon that mammals alone have developed sabre teeth so many times while, as to my knowledge, reptiles have never developed them?
This is an excellent question! I have no simple explanation to offer you. But I think the answer may lie in the fact that reptiles in general do not have the clear differentiation of tooth types that synapsids do.
@@RealPaleontology Thanks for answering! Could it have something to do with a general skull shape or something like that? Or that reptiles can't form these bodily structure for some other reason? And could you elaborate on the tooth differentiation argument? Afaik do reptiles also have tooth differentiation, if we look at the different types of archosaurs for example or could it be that my definition is off?
Sure, mammals of course have only two sets of teeth. Once the adult teeth have erupted that it. No more teeth and if any are lost or broken they cannot be replaced. The teeth of reptiles are continually replaced throughout life. Obviously this is an advantage for reptiles. But the big advantage that mammals have is that because of this, they can evolve teeth with very distinct and precise occlusion. Bottom line is that this allows process food more efficiently. The other point is that mammals have very distinct tooth classes which typically have very distinct and different functions within the jaw of the one animal; incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. Overall it is a far more sophisticated kit.
After perusing the comments, the following points have not been made: 1) Musk deer males only (genus: Moschus) expose their saber teeth. So do the deer-pig males (genus: Babyrousa). So that 'exposed tooth' issue can be resolved by examination and comparison. 2) In phylogenetic analysis Dinictis and Nimravus, the 'false' saber-tooth cats, actually nests with cats like Panthera. 3) On the other hand, Smilodon nests with Kolponomos, and these with Hoplophoneus, and these with Gulo, the wolverine, and Arctodus, the short-face bear, and these with three species of Ursus, not with cats. So the earlier comment and your reply that the skeleton looked 'bearish' are supported. Melursus and Tremarctos are the most closely related living taxa in that analysis, so perhaps an extended study including these taxa would be informative. Neither are sabertooth taxa and neither are apex predators. 4) Barbourofelis, Thylacosmilus and Patagosmilus nest together as transitional marsupials to one of three convergent placental clades. Sabertoothed Didymoconus colgatei with a 5cm long skull was an ancestor. Machaeroides nested at the base of that clade, just a node or two apart from two members of the extant marsupial genus, Monodelphis. M sorex is another living sabertooth, examined here: Blanco, R. E., Jones, W. W., & Milne, N. N. (2013). Is the extant southern short-tailed opossum a pigmy sabretooth predator?. Journal of Zoology, 291(2), 100-110. 5) These phylogenetic connections were made by simply expanding the taxon list. Anyone can test this by adding taxa. Cladogram here: reptileevolution.com/reptile-tree.htm
It's not entirely clear how long humans and safe tooth coexisted in any location. But certainly humans likely played a role one way of the other for at least some species
Not really, their numbers and ranges have been drastically reduced in the last century or two. But more importantly it seems that beginning of the ice age spelt doom the sabertooths in Africa. They were gone by about 1.6 million years ago. It is likely that the extreme aridity inflicted by glacial maxima reduced the densities of big herbivores to below the threshold that could sustain sabertooths.
I just wanted to take a second to praise your excellent subtitles. I am deaf and the usual autogenerated UA-cam subtitles get completely lost with scientific nomenclature. Thanks to proper subtitles, I can enjoy your awesome content all the more. I wish more content creators took the time to do this.
Legend big up the dead people
And relatively simple to add your script in during the editing process. There is really no excuse for not doing this on any relatively scripted production.
Thanks for that. I am glad you appreciate it
Yes although I found that it can be a real pain in the butt on occasion. But yes usually it's just a matter of fleshing out your script and uploading it as a text file
thanks
Felids seem particularly predisposed to adopting the saber tooth model. Today, tigers of course have rather long canines as well, but the mainland clouded leopard takes the cake as the cat with the longest canines relative to body size. It seems to me that it's specifically arboreal or semi-arboreal ambush predators that go down this path. Me personally, I'd like to see a mustelid have a crack at it!
Yeah it's a little surprising that they haven't
Would it be possible, with those big fangs dragging in the dirt, what with their low ground clearance?
I don't think so
*prey animals evolve larger body size*
Dinosaurs: get larger in response
Pseudosuchians: get larger in response
Chondrichthyes: get larger in response
Synapsids: *BIG TEEF*
Yep, it's a common theme!
@@RealPaleontology I do want to say, you are incorrect about one thing, perhaps two... There are a few species of mammals that have saber teeth today. Not used in the same way as hunting per se, but they do have elongated canines. Walrus, they have saber teeth. And muntjac or similar tusked deer. They aren't prehistoric animals. But they do have saber like teeth
😋 had to look up Pseudosuchians and Chondrichthyes though. Now I get it :)🌷🌱
Then why no super-mamouths, the size of houses?
Elephant tusks are elongated incisor teeth. So when the sabertooths fought woolly mammoths it was a battle between the canines and incisors. (Yet no canids were involved.)
I guess that's right
This comment is begging a pun.
@Leftatalbuquerque ok so let's hear it?
@ I've yet to come up with one. Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward would've been so disappointed in me...
@@RealPaleontology Ok, here goes:
So... no one cried, "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war...
I’ve known there were a couple of sabretooth tigers, but had no idea that there were that many, nor did I know they evolved quite a number of times, never mind getting bigger each time and then dying out. Thanks so much. And well stated with great pictures. You said so much in a calm way, in a short time, without rushing. Perfect lecture. :) 🐆🐅🌷🌱
Awesome. Thanks so much
Awesome video once again on my favorite predators. I really appreciate that you take the time to address every new research paper that gets published. Thank you
No worries I enjoy it
I hadn’t thought of the cycle as a ratchet, but it’s an excellent analogy. I am reminded of a professor who told us to draw a triangle and label each point of the triangle as competition, disturbance, and stress. He said every species of plant falls somewhere within the triangle, with highly competitive plants outcompeting the others during stable periods in the ecosystem. Routine but sporadic disturbances such as wildfire in pine forests favored species that could handle regular hyper-intense but not constant environmental stress. Stress-based species were highly specialized to take advantage of environments or niches where more competitive species simply couldn’t survive, such as high -salinity and other extremophile systems. Generalists are typically good competitors with basic stress and disturbances tolerances, leaning more towards competition than anything else but still hovering around the middle of the triangle.
While this model doesn’t perfectly translate to animals, I think it is useful to highlight the saber tooth design’s strengths and weaknesses. The saber tooth is a strong competitor because it can take advantage of a huge and otherwise (nearly) unreachable resource relatively easily. I would also argue that it’s highly stress-tolerant as having a large number and density of megafauna is a type of environmental stress both physically and mentally (just look at how much more uneasy lions are than grey wolves). However, this high degree of specialization makes them very poor disturbance species, unable to adapt to a shift away from their preferred megafauna prey.
I have learned so much from you, both since I found your channel and over the years as I have read your papers. Thank you so much
I think that's a pretty good analogy. And, thanks so much for the kind words.
There is a lot of evidence of sabers striking skulls of other predators, And that kinda counts as last resort. I only know of 2 cases of sabers striking bone of a prey animal and one of them may not be from sabers. Also good video.👍
Correct. And thanks!
Thank you for confirming and explaining several of the ideas I've had about Sabertooths.
Your coverage was very balanced, yet to the point!
Great thanks for that
This is becoming one of my favorite paleo channels on this platform 🙏🙏 Great Content
Thank you very much
Fascinating video - very relaxed, too. The pace gave time to take it all in and think, while listening. Some video presenters rush, and talk so fast that you have to watch bits again in order to make sense of what they’re saying. This gives food for thought generally, about specialist adaptation in fauna of all sizes, and all while watching and listening. Just about perfect presentation. Thank you.
Hey thanks much appreciated glad you like it
Hey Professor I dunno if you take video requests, but would you consider making a video on Barbourofelis? And perhaps barbourofelids in general? The level of convergence this animal has with the dirk-toothed cats is mind-blowing to me and the simple fact they are the most extreme in terms of saber-toothed adaptations makes their lack of research and public attention surprising to me. They are really cool animals that i’d like to learn more about but papers are seriously limited
Yes that is an exceptional case of convergence and there will be looking at them just not quite sure when
I read this paper a short timer ago, and this video is an excellent summary. What I liked about both is noting the significance of the variations in sabertooth morphologies and their implications for niche separation with regard to prey species, and thus differences in ecological or habitat preferences. It struck me that this was another example of seeing something that has been under our noses for a very long time, but nobody looked closely enough until now.
Yes, I totally agree. For decades people have focused largely on the big sexy more specialised species (me included). But certainly, in recent years there have been a number of far more comprehensive treatments looking at the full gamut of variation. And yes, there are multiple incidents of coexistence among different species of sabertooth. It’s also interesting to consider the steps that haul a lineage through the evolutionary ratchet. A good start might be more information on the killing behaviour of species of potentially incipient sabertooths, i.e., the two species of clouded leopard. Unfortunately, they are as notoriously reclusive as they are beautiful to behold.
1:08 scariest smile of the sabretooths
Never smile at a smiladon.
No, you can't get friendly with a smiladon. ...
I agree with you there
Very interesting and didactic presentation! Thank you
Glad you liked it!
I am currently readin "Sabertooth" my Mauricio Anton, its a fantastic book going in depth into the topics mentioned in this video. But i assume you have probably already read it, since i saw some illustrations from the book in the video here.
Yes, I do have it. It’s a wonderful book! Mauricio is a very talented guy
Specializing is great until it suddenly isn't.
Clouded Leopards are the closest to sabretooth cats we have these days.
Yep they suddenly are
No they aren't
Sweet! A new paleo-channel. And we are getting in on the ground floor! Gonna be awesome watching the growth!
Fingers crossed!
Where did you do your education in paleo? I'm from melb and considering it
I got my PHD at the University of New South Wales, University of New England in Armidale and Flinders in Adelaide and the only two in Australia that offered degrees in paleontology,
There's actually a good argument to be had regarding the clouded leopard being considered a still existing saber toothed cat, as their upper canine teeth almost go past the lower jaw when fully closed.
Yes, my colleague Per Christiansen wrote a paper on this in 2006 I think it was. Did you know there are now two species of clouded leopard generally recognised
Clouded Leopards who are literally their close relatives: Allow me to introduce myself
Not close relatives, but insipient saber tooth maybe
Highly specialized carnivores are the first to go when environmental changes happen. The Pleistocene transitioning into the Holocene epoch happened so fast that many of the pleistocene mega fauna couldn't adapt fast enough.
Absolutely true! But of course, the extinction of Homotherium in Africa Europe and Asia appears to have been a far more stepwise process
Excellent video, have just started watching your videos and it's lovely to see real paleontologists/zoologists come on platforms like this to talk
Something I've always wondered is how would this specialized morphology (like relatively fragile upper canines) affect intraspecific combat in, let's say smilodon?
That's an interesting question. I would guess for now that although intraspecific combat does occasionally lead to the death of one of them, and sometimes serious injury to one or both, they combatants really try to avoid anything too prolonged. This is because such altercations are usually over mates or territory, and one of the animals is likely to give up and get away before too much damage is done; after all, predators need to be in relatively good shape and intact to successfully feed themselves and get more chances at finding a mate. Death do occur, of course, but I think they are the exception. So, whatever sabertooths did in this "arena", I suspect it probably didn't involve much use of those sabers. Perhaps a lot of snarling, display behavior, and perhaps clawing. That's just my guess.
@@8888Rik Lack of sexual dimorphism suggests that they would be less aggressive than modern and extinct panthera (like atrox) in intraspecific combat
There is a specimen with a hole in it's skull, thought to be due to a fight with a smilodon, but if biting into bone is a last resort, I wonder how that battle might have played out
I agree, most modern felids always start the fight off with vocal aggression and they fight prolonged for 30-ish seconds before taking a break and resorting to that again, and smilodon was apparently even less aggressive than that, so
I'd say that trying to subdue something likely equally tough as you to try to get a good, SAFE bite in is pretty damn difficult
@@crosforussolos Yes I agree, and I think that if that cranial puncture was indeed from a saberooth, it was a rare, one-off kind of event.
Your point about a lack of discernible sexual dimorphism brings up an interesting point, which is exactly what kind of social structure they had. I side with the folks who suspect that they were in fact living in groups somewhat like "prides", bt the only extant social cats, lions, shown significant sexual dimorphism, and this figures significantly into their overall social behaviors. To me, this suggests that lion prides are not a reliable model for sabertooth "prides" or social groups. Maturing males were presumably forced out for obvious reasons that would also apply to sabertooth social groups, but beyond that, the comparison would seem to break down.
Really interesting channel with high quality content! (commenting for better visibility as i've got this video suggestion rather unexpected but really happy to get it )😊
Thank you very much! Maybe share it around?
@RealPaleontology unfortunately have not much friends interesting in the paleontology - i'm IT and all my surroundings is IT, family included 🙃 but i will send link to my son - he is master grade student in computer science and looking around for the field of research
Thanks every little bit helps! My oldest son is a computer engineer. Good career
The sabertooth body plan lives on in the cloudrd leopard at least. I checked before leaving this and for it's size, the canines on these guys are pretty impressive. I'm not saying the two cats are related at all (I didn't look that hard) but at minimum there's a convergence between them.
Yes a paper has been written on this. Given time the clouded leopard could certainly evolve intuous sabre tooth
The skeleton reminds me of a bear’s build.
Exactly! These big sabre tooth s tended to be very bare-like.
My type of type of content. Very informative video.
Great glad you liked it
Any theories out there on them targeting the guts of prey? That's the largest soft part. Seems safer than the neck area with all its vertebrae.
Yes, Bill Akersten floated this theory back in 1985
It is most comforting to note that humans have little to fear from Sabertoothed Tigers, what with our being so agile and not being a big lumbering species. I can rest comfortably tonight.
I think the greatest advantage that we have is that their extinct and we're not!
@@RealPaleontology To the victors go the spoils.
In half a second I can think of : walrus, warthog, hippopotamus
Yep but they're very differently shaped teeth an obviously for a different purpose
How fast do you think Faitalis was approx?
That's an interesting question. I don't think anyone's attempted to quantify that. In a short burst it was probably comparable to big cats today.
03:18 I thought the summary said that once a biter goes down a saber tooth path, it seems good at first but then gets out of control and the biter disappears. I can't help but wonder if the same pattern exists with Dimetrodon and Inostrancevia. I know the pattern exists with internet communication methods like Yahoo groups, MySpace, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram. Those all start out well and then get too extreme. The rest of your talk was describing how that worked with saber teeth. (Does Inostrancevia have a broken hip like the one you displayed in 09:28? I have a hip like that, a week in intensive care.)
Yes good point, I haven't looked into this in detail with respect to gorgonopsians. They really are quite different in many respects to mammalian sabertooths.At a think there is any evidence of hip dysplasia in Inostrancevia
Your obsession is valid. 🙃Grow, channel grow!
(My personal obsession? Sickle-claws: dromaeosaurids and troodontids.)
Yes indeed! And yes, thanks to the engagement of people such as your good self, my little channel does seem to be growing quite well! Thanks for that!
This may be off-topic, but when describing the "evolutionary ratchet" and the trade-offs between a saber-toothed canine vs. agile prey I was suddenly thinking of the combat tactics of the Roman Cavalry vs. the Greek Hoplites
Saber-toothed cats and Greek Hoplites: specialized for slow-moving attacks and defensive attacks
Agile prey and Roman Cavalry: fast-moving and highly capable of better defending themselves
Interesting analogies
Great video, thank you. I never bought the theory that the *sole* reason sabertooth cats keep "failing" is that the teeth are too fragile and break. If that was the case, surely the evolutionary advantage would not have led to the more extreme versions in the first place, due to natural selection. Clearly, fragile or not, the sabreteeth were supremely effective. The idea that the _rest of the cat_ also has to adapt in very specialised ways and that being so extremely powerful (and heavy) ambush predators rather than being capable of pursuit hunting would have limited them if the megafauna prey the specialised in went scarce seems to me to be far better as an explanation.
I think the point is not that the teeth are too fragile for the job they're designed for, that is to kill large list agile prey. This together with a range of other adaptations renders them less will adapted to take smaller prey. When population densities of large prey fall below a critical threshold it means that the sabre cats have nowhere to go. They are too specialised.
Wonderful video thank you!!!! There used to be a lot of conjecture about how the hell sabretooths even managed to feed themselves with a pair of massive canines at the front of their mouths - they looked like a barrier to getting anything in them, but obviously they managed. I have a very vague recollection of it being surmised somewhere they were pretty dependent on drinking blood! When I was fifteen I watched the film Quest for Fire in which they got a couple of lions with phoney big teeth to stand in for sabretooths and as fitting fake teeth couldn't have been an easy job I suspected they must have tried leaving them on when feeding the lions during the shoot. So what happened? A bit of an accidental opportunity for 'experimental' palaeontology perhaps. Years later in the book 'The Velvet Claw' there was actually a reference to a film where they found lions with phoney sabres fed perfectly well with them in - I'm 99% certain it must have been Quest for Fire. A dam shame I think that a bit more isn't made of this incident, it's instructive and a bit of a 'fun' story. Thanks again, sabre teeth like large, armoured terrestrial animals are an evolutionary constant missing from the present, a crying shame.
Hey thanks a lot. I remember that movie it was quite entertaining at the time! It is a crying shame the same tooths are gone. But hey we do have a frozen saber to us now, who knows maybe they will be back
A friend of mine hoped to evolve saber teeth. Instead he evolved a smooth hairless cranium.
Hate it when that happens........
A channel that is not AI!!! I'm so happy I just found this channel!
Great glad you like it!
Very nice short documentary.
I think there is a “mini” Sabretooth still exists nowadays: the cloud leopard. 😊
Yes there are two species in fact. A colleague of mine road of paper on this back in 2007 I think
I have a question regarding the sabers of these big cats; where they always exposed? One of the arguments for large carnivorous theropods like T. rex having lips covering their teeth is that they would keep them moist at al time as teeth can dry out if left exposed to the air for long periods of time. With this in time, how did the various sabretooth cat genera and species keep their teeth moist, especially ones like Smilodon that had long sabers but short chins? And is there any talk about the sabertoothed cats with the long chins forming a fleshy pocket for keeping their canines moist?
Yes there has been research on this. Certainly for homotherium it has been the strongly suggested that the sabres were concealed so to speak. However this doesn't seem to be the case for Smilodon
I would love to watch a video about those enormous chin protrusions that so many sabertooth hunters had. I find it intuitive to think that they supported fleshy pouches for the teeth or at least large elongated chops of some kind that could wrap around the canines. And yet, the majority of paleoart completely ignores this and just shows animals like Thylacosmilus with bare saber teeth and a weird boomerang chin that has no specialized function whatsoever.
Yes that's a really good idea. A few people have mentioned this. A paper was written on it in 2022. I might do a little episode on it.
Amphimachairodus giganteus, Machairodus lahayishupup , Smilodon populator are the some of the largest sabertooths
That's absolutely true
One question I'd have for your expertise on the subject is do the fossils show structural evidence of the larger sabre teeth which might have lacked 'pockets' to keep the tooth moisturized and protected had more tusk like construction in fossils such as those of tusked pigs or the like. As I recall from childhood fascination at least, animals like Smilodon may have not had the protective tooth 'pockets' of earlier sabre toothed predators, and this raises the matter of how do they not experience rot?
This is a good question. There has been some work done on it. It's very likely that Homotherium kept its canines as concealed carry so to speak. Personally I think it's very likely that many other species did too, especially those with shorter canines. But this seems unlikely for Smilodon. Of course, as you know a number of living species appear to do just fine with exposed teeth or tusks. Although clearly as you suggest keeping them moist would be ideal.
@@RealPaleontology I wonder in case of smilodon that the sabre teeth being unprotected put a permanent cap upon its lifespan beyond usual organ failure/old age causes. Some pack mammals do support disabled members, but it's not surefire and maimed lions still often die even if they recover from their wounds. How certain is it that gum-pockets for teeth existed on species anyway, or rather how can we be certain a fossilized species *didn't* have such tooth protections. Do they usually have distinct anchors on the mandibles, or is it something only discernible through tissue impressions on fossils?
I am glad you asked! Theoretically, this may have put a cap on their lifespan. Of course, the fact that mammals only have two generations of teeth puts a cap on us all! In real life though it’s pretty unlikely that many males in particular survive beyond the age of 10. Certainly, very few male lions live beyond this in the wild and I think 14 pretty much the maximum. Females typically live a couple of years longer. And, yes, there is pretty compelling evidence that Smilodon at least was a social animal. A paper was published a few years ago demonstrating profound hip dysplasia that had clearly survived many months and perhaps years beyond the time of injury. It’s difficult to imagine how this could have happened without some kind of support network!
Did they have stripes?
Short answer, we don’t know in the vast majority of cases. One thing we can be sure of is that the frozen Homotherium cub recently found in Siberia did not have stripes.
those small enough to climb trees no. those who stalking the forests yes.
just like the other kitties we got.
@@zimriel not sure what your point is there?
But how did they eat or chew
They slice through meat and skin using their big carnassial cheek teeth
Since I was a child I was always facinated by "saberthooths". Why would such a predator need such big canides? Yeah they can dig deeper, but they are also easier to break, makes harder to open the jaw for a large bite and they are also extra weight.
I wish they could do similar experiments but focus on its capacity to hook itself into flesh and tear it. I feel his morphology is specially inclined to hook itself into a large prey and hold itself on to it. A specialized animal to hunt large prey, striking them from below where you have less bones (belly, under the neck, the sides of the belly, etc) and hold itself either until the animal bleed out, or they get pulled out tearing a large wound on the prey.
I do believe that sooner or later this will be done. But of course, someone has to fund the research!
I think a really important component is how would a predator access large prey especially if not a pack hunter without these.
If they're pushed into the niche that's the best nature can come up with and that's that.
Still I'd like to consider the world if we were in the other half of the ouroboros, where instead of the age of smaller generalists it was larger specialists. Even if that's antithetical to human stewardship. It eats us? We don't usually suffer it to live.
I see your point. But there are big predators that do kill big prey without save your teeth
I must have OCD because my eyes instantly latched on to the loose doorknob on the right.
Yeah, got to get around to fixing that. Problem is it’s a lovely old home and it’s difficult to find a suitable door knob. Might I suggest trying to focusing on the marsupial lion passed to your upper right.
@@RealPaleontology Lol, ugly buggers weren't they? Convergent evolution is more common than most people realise, and it's fascinating that certain body-forms reappear again and again throughout history, with the 'crab-form' by far the most successful.
Yes it is, and of course it constitutes a strong pillar to evolutionary concepts. And yeah, the crab morphotype rocks
Such as Smilodon i imagine it holding on to the front of a large prey animal and once the teeth were buried into the fleshy throat area, using those neck muscles to pull back and forth like a dog holding onto a rope toy, therefore the blade being used just as a carving knife through a beef joint. Its can jump off then because the damge would be horrendous. I think the sheer amount of predator competition at the time would possibly lead to this assassination technique. Just my thoughts, sounds cool to me though. Thankyou for your videos and sharing your knowledge my friend.
For sure there was extreme competition and that had to play a big role. And thanks!
Answer: we don't know why Panthers survived & Machairodonts didn't. Adaptations that specialized in large prey likely made them unable to cope with the Bolling-Alerod & Younger Dryas, like Homotherium experienced; however, their decline began earlier than that in some places. Personally, I think it just came down to raw numbers, this is the nature of competition in nature. The lineages that fail to get the edge on another in the same niche will dwindle until they fade into history, many such cases.
Yup, it is of course a numbers game. But I have to say that the extinction of Homotherium remains enigmatic to me. It certainly is very unusual for such a widespread taxon to bite the dust. But of course, Big specialised apex predators are always particularly vulnerable to extinction because they can never occur in anything but very low densities.
Having seen my own cat yawn, I facetiously submit that sabretooths still exist, they're just disguised.
Yup, even small cats have big teeth
Where does the cloud leopard sit for extant species?
It definitely has the longest canines for its size of any living cap
Phenix video as always!
Not quite sure what that means but I'm going to take it as a compliment!
Saber tooth cats lived long enough actually about 40 million years starting oligocene epoch, we wish we last that long!!!
Time will tell as they say
Incidentally, the first sabre tooth cat or felid did not appear until the Miocene. There were sabre tooths in the Olgocene, but these weren't cats.
Thanks again for your lucid explanation. Somewhere I had seen the Clouded Leopard (Neofelis nebulosa) presented as a living sabre-toothed cat and when I just checked at Wiki, the canines on the skull image certainly looked impressive, but clearly conical and not flattened like a true sabre-tooth (more an estoc-toothed perhaps). The Wiki page also has an image with a pretty impressive gaping mouth, though. Has anyone studied how the Clouded Leopard kills its prey?
Yes a beautiful animal and intriguing.
I actually have the cast of clouded leopard skull in my office. Unfortunately there's very little information on how they kill their prey. A very reclusive animal.
Great content just subbed
awesome thanks
Something cool involving paleontology in your native Australia
Remember how I was talking about the creatures of the ordovician? Something in your country might have to do with that Extinction event.
The ordovician mass extinction was caused by glaciers and scientists found something in the southeast of Australia that they think might be a catalyst.
It's a buried ring structure and magnetic anomaly which has tentative characteristics of an asteroid impact, it's 300 miles across and due to how buried it is is estimated to be between 525-417 million years old, which place is it roughly the time of the mass extinction which happened to 445 Mya.
Identification is not conclusive yet analyzing drill samples is necessary, but if it's true it'll be significant.
The theory is that global cooling from this possible impact might have been the shot in the arm that triggered the glaciation and in turn the mass extinction.
If this is the case then the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is now outclassed in its body count
The deniliquin impact structure
Is there a paper you're referring to here?
@@RealPaleontology yes
@ so what is it
@@RealPaleontology and bear in mind with my wording it's not absolutely certain if it's an impact crater or responsible for the mass extinction
That will be certain until drill samples are analyzed
Can you make a video about Nimravids and Barbourofelis the cat like animals?
Absolutely will and have been doing some research on these over although I can't say exactly when
@RealPaleontology thank you
Sounds to me, that these cats with such huge teeth likely (much like the lion and Cape buffalo) launched attacks to wear the bigger prey down over time. Not killing them quickly. I think the teeth rather than being for maximum damage, it may actually just be for keeping ahold of prey long enough to have effectively worn them to exhaustion. Yes severe blood loss would result, but we don’t really know how these attacks actually would have played out. I just see what big cats Do now and imagine it’s just the same type of behaviour and in a different scale it would also explain all the damage done to the torso and lower back. Hanging onto a giant, being whipped around all the while up against trees and such.
Well that's one interpretation. I disagree on that but I have to concede we will never know for sure
When I was in the 3rd grade, I had an idiot teacher who actually told us that SabreToothed cats were extinct because they "starved to death because they had trouble eating".
Considering how beneficial these teeth were and how much they reappeared through convergent evolution, her silly theory seems even more ridiculous!
OMG!
The gorgonopsids are really sad they couldn’t make it to the saber tooth morphology video
I thought about it, but they really are different kettle of fish. But rest assured I will be doing more videos on those guys
I am not denying the concept of the evolutionary ratchet. It certainly seems very interesting. But I think any honest attempt to answer (why aren't there any sabertooth cats today) has to start at "humans".
If it weren't for the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction, there would almost certainly still be sabertooth cats in North America and possibly Eurasia. I don't think we can boame the evolutionary ratchet for their dissapearance. I'd even say that any attemp to draw evolutionsry patterns should be careful with including the Holocene, since at the very least everyone should admit that there is a significant chance that modern humans drastically impacted those ecosystems.
Maybe I'm too nickpicky. You did mention that the dissapearance of Megahervibores probably caused their extinction. I just thought that it was important to mention how unprecedented this extinction was in terms of bodymass selectivity, and thus why it doesn't seem a good period to study this pattern of evolution and extinction.
For sure humans must have had an impact. To be honest I honestly don't think we'll ever know how much
@RealPaleontology oh well, you might be right, but I hope you're not😅
The sad fact is that we can almost never tease apart the relative significance of different extinction drivers in living species. Although, human influence is almost always the prime driver in the here and now. Regarding megafaunal extinction, multiple papers come out every year claiming to have resolved the issue. Some putting it on humans others putting it on climate. It's been this way for many decades. I can't see this changing. And that's why to be honest that I have largely stood back this.
Great video! Really interesting stuff! My question about the more extreme sabertooth species is: how did the size of their canines affect their ability to consume their large prey? Did the use them to, for want of a better term, cut their prey into more manageable chunks, or did they use their molars to chew bits off? What does the evidence point to here?
That's a really good question. The consensus view is that the sabre teeth would not have greatly impeded their ability to consume their prey. Where did they actually used them to carve up the meat is something that's not being much discussed. But you're right I think it should. It has been argued that Thylacosmilus used its canines to open the belly of its prey. You could watch my video on that. But otherwise I don't think much has been said
@RealPaleontology Thank you for your reply ☺️ It seems to me that it would make more sense, at least for the species with the extreme canines, to not even use their lower jaw during their attack. If the muscles in their lower jaws were weak, then it seems plausible that simply digging their canines into their prey, then using their neck muscles to rip, without even opening their mouth would get the job done just as well as with getting their lower jaws involved in the process... Obviously I'm not thinking about the ones with the "Hapsburg chin" here... Maybe opening the jaws was done to simply get it out of the way, rather than risking damage to the lower jaw? Is the evidence for the extent that the jaws could open fairly settled, or is there still some debate?
The general consensus is that these more extreme varieties pushed the lower jaw into the prey, and then used the neck muscles to drive the canines in
@@RealPaleontology Thanks! The gap between tip of the canines and lower jaw at full gape is what's throwing me... It's such a small distance, compared to the full extent of the opening.
Yes, I know what you mean. Remember that when the cat drives those canines in it's not pushing them straight down, but rotating its head around the neck joint
Good thank you
The sabretooth niche is currently full of snakes, so I don't blame mammals for being hesitant to jump back in!
While it's unlikely that any new sabretooths will evolve in these parts during the next few decades, de-extinction of pre-existing species (or reasonably convincing attempts) may not be so far away.
I wonder why they didn't simply dominate the kills of less dangerous predators, when their own prey became scarce.
Perhaps they weren't good at fighting other super-predators, meaning they needed to make a lot of kills for themselves, because scavengers would quickly drive them away and claim the spoils. A sad end for these majestic slayers.
Full time scavenging doesn't add up in terms of energetics for a large mammalian carnival
good video 😎
thanks
Nice.. Allways happy to find good Paleo folks.
7 days/BenGthomass have just done a nice video on the (frozen Sabre kitten)
Cool. I'll take a look.
I want your opinion on a theory of mine
There was a Permian non mammalian synapsid called anteosaurus, it was a 5 m 600 kg Hunter
The same guy who described the African inostrancevia also studied Anteo, but never stated what it's killing method was.
Anteosaurus apparently had a powerful bite but the teeth behind the canines were kind of reduced, normally if a predator kills by bite force that has big post canine teeth to make effective use of that bite force, but anteosaurus didn't. Although its canine teeth were big they were more similar proportionally to that of a big cat rather than to a sabre tooth. The canine teeth didn't interlock either, this is important. In many shearing hit-and-run predators like xenosmilus, inostrancevia and hyaenodon, the canines interlock which grants a scissor-like cutting motion and helps them sheer off meat. Because this adaptation is ubiquitous across synapsids across the family tree, I would expect anteosaurus to be no different but it doesn't have interlocking canines.
Its skull bones are also heavily thick and ossified now it's a dinocephalian, the members of that family were designed were designed to headbutt each other and anteosaurus was no different. but those same adaptations to resist stress of head-butting behavior could also help the skull resist stress of a struggling prey item.
It's my opinion anteosaurus probably killed prey like a big cat, biting the throat and suffocating it to death. We already see so many other proto mammals converge on modern-day mammals I suppose a convergence with big cats was only inevitable.
What do you think?
I have an episode dealing with one of the largest permian saber tooth synapsids. I'd be interested in what you think of that
@@RealPaleontology I love it although it needs to be said inostrancevia had coexisted with rubidgine gorgonopsians in Africa because we have fossils of inostrancevia from Tanzania which date to the wuchiapignian epoch, the peak of the rubidgines
It didn't just migrate to Africa because of the crap going down in Siberia it had already been in Africa before the Siberian traps
@@RealPaleontology what do you think of my theory n rationale behind anteosaurus
Thanks! The dating on that single Tanzanian pre-maxilla is not universally accepted. And who said it migrated because of the crap going down in Siberia? Incidentally, this wasn't a migration, but a range expansion.
Still digesting it.
The point at the end makes me wonder why Homotherium went extinct when it's endurance hunting body plan could have theoretically allowed it to go after smaller prey like wolves or hyenas could.
Maybe them being diurnal put them into direct competition with more flexible predators like lions (who can theoretically partition by hunting at night) and especially humans?
Yes you're right. Homotherium is a very interesting case. Even more mysterious given its extensive geographic range through much of the ice Age
I don't think the sabertooths was able to open up their mouth wide enough to bite anything with their saber tooths.
So what's the point of having saber tooths anyway, beside of punching holes in paper ?
Damn it - 40 million yrs of evolution and it doesn't work. Dumb-arse cats!
@@RealPaleontology Yeah, there is also a deer having the same problem. But it's also worse, because it doesn't even hunt pray.
I guess all sabertooth predators had their elongated canines covered with soft tissue. That could be extended lower jaw od extended upper lips or a combination of both. It is obviously noticed in a case of Thylacosmilus, less obvious in Homotherium and the least obvious in the case of Smilodon. If Smilodon did not have the extended bone tissue in lower jaw, then it must have something else; an extended skin, a skinny poach or possibly a cartilage scabbard.
Why should be a soft tissue an necessity ? Simply because a long teeth exposed to the air, cold, heat and other elements would make a long tooth even more bridle that it already was.
My personal experiment. Years ago I exposed my wisdom tooth to the elements and dag it into an ant colony to clean and preserve it. After two months it became so bridle that I only threw it away. Now imagine a sabertooth that lives in heat or cold or dry enviroments. I think that teeth absolutely need a protection with similar body temperature and a constant moisture of saliva.
And one even more radical idea... I also wish to add that imagination of sabertooths gaping jaw resembles me to a gaping jaw of venomous snakes or some large spiders.... and I would not be wonder if there were also a case of.... venom ? No need to kill a prey animal instantly, but to bite, follow and wait like a comodo dragon should be quite a rational option. And then after stalking and waiting they deliver a fatal bite on the neck. After all many of the species had a body build as a persistent stalkers. It is unlikely to prove that "venom hypothesis" and we will probably never know that for sure.... except maybe once through the DNA of recently discovered Homotherium ????
The current thinking on this is that sabertooths with well-developed phalanges on their lower jaws probably did where there canines as ’concealed carry’. Smilodon probably not.
I still can't wrap my head around how these animals bit anything larger than a carrot. Even if those heads opened 180 degrees, the gap between the teeth and the bottom jaw don't seem big enough. Plus, how common was it for them to pump the front edge of their giant teeth while trying to bite an animal and breaking it? or if an animal struggled with those giant teeth in its flesh? the leverage on those teeth would be massive wouldn't it? Especially on the tip. They aren't even conical and thick, but relatively slender.
Yeah, and can see how you think that. But we know they definitely did it. There are various confirmed instances of these sabres being driven through bone, including into the skulls of other sabretooths.
I can't see saber teeth as being advantageous. I'd be afraid of breaking them if I had them.
Yes this is the trade off! And yet it's at morphology that has real evolved time and time again. The bigger they are the more effective they are, but the bigger they are the more likely they are to break. It really is a wonderful example of what we call an evolutionary trade off
Like tusks that often got in the way, wasnt as good as it looks,
It's got to have something going for it because it keeps coming back
Coʻuld the two specis of Clouded Leopard be the next preceding or precursor animals from where the next abertooth animals evolved from? The original idea was not minem
Yes, this suggestion was proposed by Per Christiansen back in 2006. Incidentally, I published a paper with him on bite force in mammalian carnivores in 2007.
I bet solitary hunting is the big difference in behavior that drives the evolution of saber teeth. A lone predator can take down big prey solo.
Maybe. Another hand the great majority of cats are solitary anyway. There is some evidence that Smilodon and homotherium we're both social animals
@@RealPaleontology so many intriguing questions.
Absolutely
You could easily put long-sharp teeth in front of the teeth of modern lion, and you can call it as "Modified Saber-Tooth"
I guess you could
Sorry if this is an ignorant comment, but since the sabertooths disappear when large prey become too scarce, shouldn't they still be frequent in areas in which elephants are still roaming, like parts of Africa and India? Or even there their numbers are too small?
That's not a silly question at all. I think the point is though that that populations have been squeezed through bottlenecks at times of climatic extreme. The predators are more likely to go extinct then they're prey especially if we are talking about highly specialized predators like sabertooths. Consequently the prey population can survive and replenish. But the predator is extinct
I suspect this is going to sound simple minded, but:
If a large sabertooth is forced to prey on smaller animals, then the broad sweep of its 'sabers' are more likely to go past the windpipe and jugular arteries and catch upon the cervical spine. This is more likely to damage its narrow canines.
Of course that assumes it's going for the throat. The rib cage and hind legs pose a problem when going for the stomach, but the prey would have to kick forward with the hind legs to protect its belly. (So take the legs out first?)
Not a silly question at all! And yes, this would have made processing small prey or difficult. But I think the real issue is that all of the postcranial adaptations that typically come with the big sabertooth design package make it increasingly unlikely that they could have caught small, agile prey in the first place.
The walrus is interesting, in captivity it is reported to be able to take out the bottom plug of it basin. How about a comparative study?
It would be interesting I think some studies have actually been done on this
In a way, we do have sabertooths in the modern world: the clouded leopards.
Yes that's true. Per Christiansen wrote a paper on this back in 2006
Maybe in 15 million years in Australia the giant sabertoothed offspring of the feral cats of today will hunt the offspring of the feral camels of today.
Thank as always very interesting as always it does to another question. "Climate Change," human hunting and the evolution of vampire bats development of its relationship with the Rabies as well as the development of relationship between Little Brown Fire Ant, a.k.a. Electric Ant (Wasmannia auropuntata) and the disease Keratopathy, specificly Florida Keratopathy can explain the elimination of large herbivores in South America while "Climate Change" and human hunting possibility explaining the elimination of Cave Bears, Woolly Rhinoceroses and Mammonths in North Asia, as well as human hunting explains the absence of large marsupials in Austrailia, therefore elimination sabertoothed animals. It doesn't explain the loss of sabertoothed animals in North America where bison, moose, as well as large deer and large bear still exists. Nor does human hunting and "Climate Change" doesn't the loss of big animals doesn't explain the loss of large animals anywhere except Australia and New Zealand as large animals existed in abundance everywhere else except South America where animal-related diseaes (Rabies and Keratrophy) could also have been the crucial factor. Some other factor had to cause the extinction of the last sabertoothed animals due to previous sabertoothed animal were still in an abundance when later toothed animals evolved. My deduction or assumption.
Well this is of course a highly contentious and hotly debated question. My conclusion, it will never, ever be fully resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s why I like to concentrate on questions that can be resolved. And the one thing we now know for sure is that the blitzkrieg hypothesis is dead.
I know why…. No veterinarians with dental 🦷skills!?!?!🤔🤦🏽♂️🤣🥸
SUBSCRIBED!
Awesome
@@RealPaleontology No, your channel is awesome.
Thank you I enjoyed doing it
Why aren't male walruses the living sabertoothed member of the dog family?
I guess you could call them sabertooths. But their teeth have a very different shape and are used for a very different purpose.
The short answer is obviously because of humans not also we hunted them but we also outcompeted them.
There is evidence of neanderthal's hunting cave lions. But I don't think that humans hunting sabertooths was likely a major extinction driver. Your second suggestion carries more weight I think.
Why? They weren't real big on flossing, and with those teeth, damn!
Funnily enough there's little evidence of tooth decay. Even in our own species OK doesn't really become common until agriculture takes hold over the last 10,000 years or so.
They were Hunted into Oblivion!
Unlikely. If humans did play a role, it was more likely through out competing them for prey
Various Tribes in Chad have been seeing living Sabertooths for years. But scientists don't even investigate.
Interesting! But of course it would be difficult to get funding for such a project. Maybe I should set up a go fund me page and see if we can't get it done!
@RealPaleontology sounds like a plan.
The heck there ain't sabertooths today. I got a black one. Massive black tom with comically large fangs. Well, they're funny to me.
Now just imagine those things 10 times longer………
@@RealPaleontology I don't have to "imagine". It's right there in my genetic memory with the shape of spiders, the feel of a tittay in my mouth, and the smell of death. 🌪️💥🤷👻
Yes, poor beasts probably died out last but thats how it goes as the prey dies off. What about north american bobcat and lynx, teeth aren't the same but body style is very similar
Funnily enough it almost certainly died out before its prey did. This is typically what happens with big carnivores Once the density of their favoured prey drops below a sustainable point
clouded leopard are the last sabertooth
Or maybe the beginning of the next
You forgot about the Ford City Sabers.
what are they?
@@RealPaleontology my high school mascot lol. I made the comment to see if any of my classmates were watching. I hope I didn’t upset you. We had a big statue, of a saber tooth tiger in front of our auditorium.
Is it safe to assume that saber-toothed cats had some kind of pouch to cover their teeth like Thylacosmilus? Wouldn't the teeth become brittle without the protection of the saliva and lip tissue, or were those teeth like crocodile teeth, and they were adapted to be constantly exposed to air, like they're depicted in most paleontological art? Also, what do you think of the clouded leopard, (Neofelis nebulosa)? Could it be called the closest modern approximation of a "saber-toothed" cat because of its tooth to body size ratio? They aren't related to Smilodons, but they have the longest canine teeth relative to body size of all the extant cats.
We're pretty sure that some such as homotherium most likely did have their teeth as concealed weapons. We're also pretty sure that some such a Smilodon did not
@@RealPaleontology Thanks for answering! That's really awesome how the species varied. I have always wondered that about Smilodons and other saber cats.
No worries. Mauricio Anton published a paper on this in 2022. He concluded that most or all sabertooths with well-developed phalanges on the lower jaw probably concealed their sabre teeth. This would include subspecies with particularly large canines, such as Thylacosmilus and Barbourofelis.
Could you give some reasons as to why especially mammals are predisposed to develop sabre teeth (ranking synapsids as mammals for convenience sake for this comment)? Could it be that there undiscovered sabre toothed reptiles? What's your opinion on the phenomenon that mammals alone have developed sabre teeth so many times while, as to my knowledge, reptiles have never developed them?
This is an excellent question! I have no simple explanation to offer you. But I think the answer may lie in the fact that reptiles in general do not have the clear differentiation of tooth types that synapsids do.
@@RealPaleontology Thanks for answering! Could it have something to do with a general skull shape or something like that? Or that reptiles can't form these bodily structure for some other reason? And could you elaborate on the tooth differentiation argument? Afaik do reptiles also have tooth differentiation, if we look at the different types of archosaurs for example or could it be that my definition is off?
Sure, mammals of course have only two sets of teeth. Once the adult teeth have erupted that it. No more teeth and if any are lost or broken they cannot be replaced. The teeth of reptiles are continually replaced throughout life. Obviously this is an advantage for reptiles. But the big advantage that mammals have is that because of this, they can evolve teeth with very distinct and precise occlusion. Bottom line is that this allows process food more efficiently. The other point is that mammals have very distinct tooth classes which typically have very distinct and different functions within the jaw of the one animal; incisors, canines, premolars, and molars. Overall it is a far more sophisticated kit.
@@RealPaleontology Thanks for your explanation!
@@DiamantRush12 no problem
After perusing the comments, the following points have not been made:
1) Musk deer males only (genus: Moschus) expose their saber teeth. So do the deer-pig males (genus: Babyrousa). So that 'exposed tooth' issue can be resolved by examination and comparison.
2) In phylogenetic analysis Dinictis and Nimravus, the 'false' saber-tooth cats, actually nests with cats like Panthera.
3) On the other hand, Smilodon nests with Kolponomos, and these with Hoplophoneus, and these with Gulo, the wolverine, and Arctodus, the short-face bear, and these with three species of Ursus, not with cats. So the earlier comment and your reply that the skeleton looked 'bearish' are supported. Melursus and Tremarctos are the most closely related living taxa in that analysis, so perhaps an extended study including these taxa would be informative. Neither are sabertooth taxa and neither are apex predators.
4) Barbourofelis, Thylacosmilus and Patagosmilus nest together as transitional marsupials to one of three convergent placental clades. Sabertoothed Didymoconus colgatei with a 5cm long skull was an ancestor. Machaeroides nested at the base of that clade, just a node or two apart from two members of the extant marsupial genus, Monodelphis. M sorex is another living sabertooth, examined here: Blanco, R. E., Jones, W. W., & Milne, N. N. (2013). Is the extant southern short-tailed opossum a pigmy sabretooth predator?. Journal of Zoology, 291(2), 100-110.
5) These phylogenetic connections were made by simply expanding the taxon list. Anyone can test this by adding taxa. Cladogram here: reptileevolution.com/reptile-tree.htm
A lot to go through there. I'll take a look at this tomorrow
Humans. Its no coincidence sabertoothed predators disappeared at the same time humans arrived to a given location
It's not entirely clear how long humans and safe tooth coexisted in any location. But certainly humans likely played a role one way of the other for at least some species
There's plenty of "big lumbering prey" in Africa, but still no sabre teeth.
Not really, their numbers and ranges have been drastically reduced in the last century or two. But more importantly it seems that beginning of the ice age spelt doom the sabertooths in Africa. They were gone by about 1.6 million years ago. It is likely that the extreme aridity inflicted by glacial maxima reduced the densities of big herbivores to below the threshold that could sustain sabertooths.
If the trait does come back then it will probably be after humans have died off, we tend to kill off the large prey animals.
Yup