Research overview: the synchronous loss of La Brea predators

This overview examines the timing of extinction among the great carnivores of Rancho La Brea, including the sabertooth Smilodon fatalis and the American lion, whose latest dated remains cluster near the end of the Pleistocene. Radiocarbon studies of La Brea predators have been used to test whether these cats vanished gradually or in a relatively narrow window coinciding with the disappearance of their large herbivore prey and with regional climatic and ecological upheaval. The survey reviews how chronologies built from the asphalt deposits constrain the final phase of the southern Californian megafauna, what the apparent synchrony of predator and prey losses implies about causation, and how La Brea contributes a uniquely well-sampled record to the wider debate over why so many large cats and other megafauna died out at the close of the Ice Age.