🧬 The Felid Wiki — 3,000 research summaries

This overview surveys dental microwear texture analysis, a method that examines microscopic wear features on tooth surfaces to infer what an animal ate shortly before death. In fossil cats, the techni…

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…

This overview reviews how incremental growth lines preserved in sabertooth tooth enamel and dentine are used to reconstruct the developmental schedule of the famous canines. Like tree rings, these mic…

This overview surveys how finite-element analysis transformed understanding of sabertooth killing mechanics by revealing an apparent paradox: animals like Smilodon had skulls poorly suited to withstan…

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…

This overview examines the exceptionally powerful forelimbs of Smilodon and what they reveal about how the cat subdued prey. Compared with similarly sized living felids, Smilodon shows thickened limb…

This overview focuses on a specific line of argument about sabertooth behaviour: that severely injured Smilodon individuals survived long enough for their wounds to heal, which some researchers read a…

This overview reviews what the preserved hyoid bones of Smilodon suggest about the sounds the sabertooth may have made. In living cats, the structure of the hyoid apparatus correlates with whether a s…

This overview examines the distinctive front teeth of Homotherium and what they reveal about its killing technique. Scimitar-toothed cats possess a strongly arched, procumbent incisor arcade set forwa…

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 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 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…

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…

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 surveys the fossil record of the jaguar lineage and its spread into the Americas. The jaguar, Panthera onca, traces its origins to Old World pantherines whose descendants crossed into No…

This overview surveys efforts to determine when and where the scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium finally disappeared on each continent. In the Americas the genus persisted into the late Pleistocene, whi…

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…