Research overview: social behaviour inferences for Smilodon from pathology and assemblages

Whether sabertoothed cats lived socially is debated, and this overview reviews the lines of evidence, including healed injuries and the abundance of Smilodon in deposits such as tar seeps. Some argue that individuals surviving debilitating injuries imply group support, and that mass accumulations hint at social attraction to trapped prey, while others caution that such patterns can arise without sociality. The question bears on how these predators hunted large prey. Researchers weigh palaeopathology, taphonomy, and analogy with living social and solitary cats. Why it matters: sociality would shape interpretations of sabertooth hunting and ecology, and the debate shows how behaviour must be inferred indirectly for extinct predators, using the biology of living lions and solitary cats as competing reference models.