Research overview: mesowear and gross tooth-wear analysis in fossil felids

This overview examines mesowear and other gross tooth-wear approaches as applied to extinct cats, which assess the cumulative shape and rounding of cusps to infer long-term dietary abrasiveness and carcass-processing behaviour. Although mesowear was developed primarily for herbivores, related wear analyses on carnassials and canines of fossil felids help reveal how much bone a predator habitually consumed and how its feeding compared with living cats. The survey reviews how patterns of tooth wear, breakage, and attrition are scored and interpreted, what they suggest about the diets and competitive environments of sabertooths and other fossil cats, and how they integrate with microwear and isotopic data. It discusses the value of combining multiple wear-based proxies operating over different timescales to build a fuller picture of extinct felid feeding ecology.