South americas forgotten sabertooth, Thylacosmilus atrox
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- Опубліковано 3 тра 2023
- Over 3 million years ago, during the Miocene epoch, a fearsome and unique saber-toothed metatherian roamed the expansive plains and lush forests of South America. This extraordinary creature had a unique hunting strategy, equipped with powerful limbs, razor-sharp claws, and an unparalleled set of ever-growing, saber-like canine teeth, this was thylacosmilus atrox.
I wish Animals like Thylacosmilus would still be alive today.
The algorithm requires engagement. Lovely to see another paleontology channel talking about these forgotten beasts. They rarely get any attention on media.
algorithm needs engagement
I'm more interested in its _other_ teeth, between the reduced molars and sparse incisors how on Earth did this thing eat?? As flashy as the canines are they play no role in actually processing a carcass and eating after the deed is done. If it is indeed macropredatory my best guess was it was specialized in feeding on organs and the softest parts of a carcass.
algorithmic gods
nice video
Can't wait to see how you develop your style and channel. Liking, commenting and subbing for the algorithm
Good lucky friend!
thank you!
Have Thylacosmilus's bones been biochemical tested to see what it ate? It would not be the only animal presumed to be a carnivore to turn out to be a vegetarian.
A study has done that and it turned out to be a predator like expected…
Don't you think that the smallness and fragility of the skull and canines of the thylacosmilus made it far more likely that it was a scavenger?
With the lack of full binocular vision and that the lower jaw lacked a central symphysis implies that it was very weak and would never be able to tear through the skin of its contemporaries (unless it preyed only on the smallest of animals no bigger than a goat would be today). Any larger, the animal would risk injuring the canines; which are not as round or stable as those of the true sabertooths. Additionally, without incisors, there is no way for the animal to get muscle from the bone. Perhaps it has the serrated tongue well known in cats, but that's assuming a lot.
Also on your list of assumptions, you reason that the creature might be nocturnal. But if it is a night prowler, again we have the issue of what this animal is eating. Large, high-calorie meals are not usually nocturnal. The night is usually the time for the smaller animals that require the cover of darkness so that they themselves can eat. Most nocturnal animals are very small and are most often insects and small, skittering prey that can only come down from the trees at night because they would get clobbered during the day! I find that, but making assumptions on what "must be happening" outside of the fossil record, we often overlook the more simple answers that are staring us right in the face. It's safest not to assume behaviors that cannot immediately be known.
Speaking of the increased weight imparted to the chunky, rodent-like animal of stocky bearing at 0:35 is the largest artist's rendering of the thylacosmilus I have ever encountered. I've heard the thylac compared to perhaps, at most, the size of a cougar, maybe 80 kg representing the largest, most well-fed male, but the smaller skeleton of these animals simply doesn’t support the possibility of a creature over 100 kg and certainly not 120 kg. If it were larger, you'd have to consider that the animal must be consuming large amounts of fats along with the muscle; which brings me to another point.
What are you assuming that it eats? In order to carry such a large girth, it needs to be eating larger animals because smaller ones do not have the fat content to support such a girth. The bigger animals like bears get very large because of the high fat content of their diets; whether it be seals or salmon. Bears must first pile on the pounds by eating *everything* they come across and then get their fats after the muscle weight has been gained and they can indulge in salmon skin or walrus blubber.
What makes any sort of sense is that the thylacosmilus could very well be a simple scavenger. It's too difficult to get its meals from the large number of animals with gigantism such as the megatherium, terror birds and like the macrauchenia. Having so many massive animals around who were themselves predators, wouldn't it stand to reason that, with so much meat on the hoof (so to speak) the thylacosmilus could use its massive fangs to rip open a bloated abdomen and eat the vitamin-rich organ meats within?
I'm not attacking you personally. But I think that some of the information that you have acquired might be somewhat specious and I urge you to look again at the fossil record and speak with other archaeologists. Run your theories past them. You may be right about all of this and I could be talking out of my ass. I doubt this, but anything's possible!
Good luck and happy hunting!
There is no way it was a scavenger just based on the fact that it has sparse incisors and small reduced canines, this thing would not be able to feed on the leftovers of other predators like tough sinew and bones.
engaged
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ye
algorithm
T,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,atrox,,,,,,,,,,,,good vid but ditch the robo narrator please!
sabretooth cats teeth don't make the slightest sense evolutionary-wise. so little so that i bet they are the product of breeding for pets.
The large canines actually make sense for the time, since a lot of stuff were bigger than today.
Let me give you an example:
You are a cave lion and you see a huge mammoth that would feed you and your pack very well, but you are just cave lions with average teeth(to body). You couldn't possibly puncture deep enough into the mammoth's skin, let alone a blood vessel to bleed it out. But next to you is a pack of smilodon. Their canines are so large they poke out of their mouth. A couple seconds later, they run at the mammoth. Some of them bite into the legs, to cripple it, while one of them deals the final blow, by jumping up high and getting a solid bite on the neck. They all let go, and wait for the mammoth to bleed out. After at least a few minutes, it falls and the smilodons start feasting. You and your pack just wait to have your turn, if that ever even happens.
Just so you know, cave lions existed elsewhere in America, this is mearly an example to show why smilodon and other sabertoothed predators survived for a long time.
@@coomsday5182 the tooth are so big they couldn't fit anything in their mouths. this is especially big problem when hunting big game, where any surface are big and wide. big tooth would make perfect sense - these teeth were simply too big and would have prevented the cats both from hunting and eating. they look as if they were bred to be fed by hand.
@@Eye_Exist So you're saying that sabertooth cats couldn't have just taken large bites, then chewed it with their back teeth? Your argument doesn't make sense. Let me dumb down what I said: big teeth equal larger prey items they can take down, and they can still open their mouth wide enough to take a bite. Sabertooth cats went extinct because of the extinction of their prey ie.: large animals. By extension large theropod dinosaurs wouldn't have survived either since they had big teeth.
@@coomsday5182 go look for a skeleton of a smilodon for example just to see how big the teeth are and what i'm talking about. "bigger bites" is ignoring the problem - the tooth are too big. bigger teeth also do not equal larger prey, because the bite power comes from jaw muscles, not the teeth, bigger teeth surface area actually reducing the effective force of the bite. the only use for bigger teeth is to penetrate more soft tissue, which is impossible if you cannot fit a bite to your mouth.
@@Eye_Exist
You’re ignoring that sabretooths could open their mouths much wider than other cats specifically so they could still bite into large animals.
Did I start this?
you have become one of the algorithm gods
@@Sedimented.Studios finally!
@@Sedimented.Studios but on a serious note, this was a great video, love videos on relatively fringe species, if you wanna keep it on the metatherian side of the mammal family, a group that is typically overlooked, I would die to see you make a video on thylacoleo.