🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview surveys what stable isotope and dental studies reveal about the diet of Panthera atrox. By analysing carbon and nitrogen values in the bone collagen of American lions alongside contempor…

This overview examines how stable isotope studies reveal the way coexisting Ice Age predators divided up prey and habitat. By comparing carbon and nitrogen values in the bone collagen of species such…

This overview surveys how stable isotope studies have been used to identify the prey of Smilodon at sites such as Rancho La Brea. By comparing carbon and nitrogen values in sabertooth bone collagen wi…

This overview addresses how sabertooths like Smilodon achieved the enormous gape needed to clear their elongated canines and apply them to prey. Estimates suggest the jaws could open to roughly twice…

This overview examines how the limb proportions of Smilodon distinguish it from pursuit predators and point to an ambush hunting style. Compared with cursorial carnivores built for speed, the sabertoo…

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 ca…

This overview reviews the quantitative methods palaeontologists use to estimate the body mass of extinct cats such as Smilodon, Homotherium, and Panthera atrox. Because soft tissue is not preserved, r…

This overview examines how the neck and skull anatomy of Smilodon and other sabertooths reveal the mechanics of the killing bite. Because the jaw muscles alone produced a comparatively weak bite, much…

This overview surveys the abundant evidence of disease, injury, and skeletal abnormality preserved in Smilodon fatalis from Rancho La Brea. The asphalt deposits yield bones showing healed fractures, a…

This overview examines the idea that dietary and predatory specialization made many extinct big cats especially vulnerable to extinction. Hypercarnivorous predators such as sabertooths, with anatomy f…

This overview surveys efforts to date the Rancho La Brea deposits and place their sabertooth fossils in time. Because the asphalt pits accumulated remains over tens of thousands of years and because p…

This overview examines how radiocarbon dating is applied to the bones of late Pleistocene cats to reconstruct their chronologies and last appearances. Directly dating individual fossils of Smilodon, c…

This overview compares the killing strategies of sabertooth cats with those of conical-toothed felids such as modern lions and tigers. Living big cats typically use short, robust canines and a powerfu…

This overview explains the long-recognized morphological divide among sabertooth cats between scimitar-toothed forms, such as Homotherium, and dirk-toothed forms, such as Smilodon and Megantereon. Sci…

This overview surveys studies of the fine structure of sabertooth canines, focusing on the serrations, or denticles, along their cutting edges and the internal histology of the teeth. Dirk-toothed cat…

This overview examines whether Smilodon fatalis showed pronounced size differences between males and females, a question with implications for its social system. Because the La Brea sample is large, r…

This overview surveys the stable isotope techniques used to reconstruct the diets of extinct cats. Carbon isotopes in bone and tooth collagen and enamel record whether prey fed on plants using differe…

This overview explains why the Rancho La Brea asphalt seeps preserve such an extraordinary concentration of sabertooths and other carnivores. Natural petroleum seeping to the surface forms sticky asph…

This overview examines the record of Panthera atrox at Rancho La Brea, where the American lion is far less common than the sabertooth Smilodon but is nonetheless represented by valuable cranial and po…

This overview examines the vertebral column and trunk anatomy of machairodont cats and how they contributed to predation. The neck vertebrae of sabertooths are often elongated and bear large attachmen…

This overview examines the fundamental mechanical compromise that shaped sabertooth skulls: achieving a gape wide enough to clear elongated canines came at the cost of bite force. Opening the jaws to…

This overview traces the long history of competing models for how sabertooths used their elongated canines. Early ideas ranged from stabbing thrusts to a clamp-type bite, but each faced the problem th…

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 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 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 t…

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 how palaeontologists distinguish the three generally recognized species of the sabertooth genus Smilodon. The earliest and smallest, Smilodon gracilis, appears in the early Pleis…

This overview reviews what is known about when and why Smilodon disappeared, with the best-dated records clustering near the end of the Pleistocene around the time of widespread megafaunal extinction…

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