🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This study used three-dimensional analysis of skull and jaw shape to test whether scimitar-toothed and dirk-toothed sabercats differed in how they killed prey. By quantifying cranial geometry across m…

Borja Figueirido, Stephan Lautenschlager, Alejandro Perez-Ramos, Blaire Van Valkenburgh · Current Biology · 2018

This study recovered complete mitochondrial genomes from the dirk-toothed Smilodon and the scimitar-toothed Homotherium, allowing a genetic test of how these iconic sabertooths relate to one another a…

Johanna L. A. Paijmans, Ross Barnett, M. Thomas P. Gilbert, et al. · Current Biology · 2017

This overview surveys Machairodus and its later, larger relative Amphimachairodus, big scimitar-toothed cats that dominated late Miocene predator guilds across Eurasia, Africa, and North America. Thes…

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 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 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 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