🧬 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 examines Megantereon, a relatively small but powerfully built dirk-toothed cat of the Pliocene and early Pleistocene whose remains are known from Africa, Eurasia, and North America. With…

This overview surveys the early machairodonts Paramachairodus and the closely related Promegantereon, small to mid-sized dirk-toothed cats known from the late Miocene of Spain. Exceptional material fr…

This overview reviews how body size changed over the long history of the machairodont sabertooths. From relatively modest early forms in the Miocene, several lineages trended toward large or giant siz…

This overview surveys what the claw anatomy of sabertooth cats reveals about how they handled prey. Like living felids, machairodonts had retractile claws, but in robust dirk-toothed forms such as Smi…

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…

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 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 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 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 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 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