🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview takes a deep-time perspective on the rise and fall of sabertooth cats, whose machairodont lineage flourished for more than ten million years before vanishing in the late Pleistocene. Aft…

This overview surveys the internal classification of the Machairodontinae, the true sabertooth cats within the family Felidae. Researchers commonly divide the subfamily into several tribes: the Smilod…

This overview examines the prey-restraint hypothesis, which holds that sabertooths, especially robust dirk-toothed forms like Smilodon, depended on overpowering and immobilizing prey with their foreli…

This overview examines the deep evolutionary divergence within Felidae between the Felinae, the conical-toothed cats that include all living species, and the Machairodontinae, the extinct sabertooths.…

This overview examines the hypothesis that sabertooths killed primarily by directing a precise bite to the throat of immobilized prey. By driving the canines into the soft ventral neck, the cat could…

This overview surveys the emerging use of zinc isotopes in tooth enamel as a tool for reconstructing the trophic level and diet of fossil cats. Unlike collagen-based carbon and nitrogen analysis, whic…

This richly illustrated scholarly book synthesizes decades of research on sabertooth cats and their relatives, written and illustrated by a leading palaeoartist and researcher. It surveys the diversit…

Mauricio Anton · Indiana University Press · 2013

This study examined how sabertooth carnivores killed large prey by comparing the anatomy and inferred mechanics of dirk- and scimitar-toothed forms across multiple lineages. The authors analysed featu…

Ki Andersson, David Norman, Lars Werdelin · PLoS ONE · 2011

This influential book provides a comprehensive illustrated survey of the cat family and its extinct members, combining scientific synthesis with detailed reconstructions of fossil felids and their sab…

Alan Turner, Mauricio Anton · Columbia University Press · 1997