🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

Estimating how large sabertoothed cats were and what they hunted is fundamental to understanding them, and this overview reviews the methods and conclusions. Body-mass estimates from limb-bone dimensi…

Growing a pair of enormous canines posed developmental challenges, and this overview reviews what is known about sabertooth canine eruption and the implications for young animals. Studies of Smilodon…

The sabertooth body plan evolved repeatedly in unrelated lineages, and this overview reviews this striking convergence and what it reveals. True cats produced sabertooths such as Smilodon and Homother…

Sabertoothed cats are often divided into dirk-toothed forms with long, narrow canines and scimitar-toothed forms with shorter, broader, serrated canines, and this overview reviews the functional and e…

Sabertoothed cats vanished in the late Pleistocene alongside much of the large-mammal fauna, and this overview reviews hypotheses for their extinction and its significance. Proposed drivers include th…

Sabertooths such as Smilodon had exceptionally muscular, robust forelimbs, and this overview reviews their inferred role in subduing prey before the bite. Strong, heavily built front limbs would let t…

Sabertoothed cats needed extraordinary jaw gapes to bring their long canines to bear, and this overview reviews how their jaw mechanics achieved this. Estimates place maximum gape far beyond that of a…

The long, blade-like canines of sabertoothed cats were powerful weapons but also potentially fragile, and this overview reviews how they may have been protected from fracture. The favoured solution is…

Driving long canines into prey is thought to have required powerful neck muscles in sabertoothed cats, and this overview reviews the evidence for enhanced head-depression musculature. Enlarged attachm…

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…

Sabertoothed cats are thought to have killed very differently from living felids, and this overview reviews the leading canine-shear hypothesis in that comparative light. Where modern big cats use a p…

This study built a high-resolution finite-element model of the skull of the sabertoothed cat Smilodon fatalis and compared its mechanical behaviour with that of a modern lion. The simulations indicate…

McHenry, C.R.; Wroe, S.; Clausen, P.D.; Moreno, K.; Cunningham, E. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2007