Sabertooth , livre ebook

Sabertooth
Life of the Past James O. Farlow, editor
SABER TOOTH

Mauricio Ant n
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2013 by Mauricio Ant n
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in China
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ant n, Mauricio.
Sabertooth / Mauricio Ant n.
pages cm. - (Life of the past)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01042-1 (cl : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01049-0 (ebook) 1. Saber-toothed tigers. I. Title.
QE882.C15A55 2013
569 .7 - dc23
2013001962
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
FOR MY FAMILY AND IN MEMORY OF ALAN TURNER.
AND WHAT SHOULDER AND WHAT ART
COULD TWIST THE SINEWS OF THY HEART?
AND WHEN THY HEART BEGAN TO BEAT,
WHAT DREAD HAND AND WHAT DREAD FEET?
WILLIAM BLAKE, THE TYGER
Contents
C

Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. What Is a Sabertooth?
2. The Ecology of Sabertooths
3. A Who s Who of Sabertoothed Predators
4. Sabertooths as Living Predators
5. Extinctions
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
F
FOR THE PAST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS I HAVE HAD THE PRIVILEGE OF spending time in the company of Africa s charismatic big cats - the lions, leopards, and cheetahs that my wife, Angie, and I have come to know as individuals, recording their lives in words, drawings, and photographs in the Masai Mara in Kenya, the northern extension of Tanzania s great Serengeti National Park.

The Mara-Serengeti is an ancient land: there are rocks at the heart of the Serengeti that are more than three billion years old. Standing on a hilltop overlooking the vastness of the Serengeti s short-grass plains during the rainy season, you can witness a Pleistocene vision, the land awash with animals. Hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebras, tens of thousands of gazelles, and hundreds of elands and ostriches share the mineral rich grasslands. Dotted among them you can pick out the sloping backs and powerful forequarters of spotted hyenas as they amble along, the herds parting and closing again as the predators pass through or begin to hunt. Prides of lions rest up in the shade of granite outcrops known as kopjes that emerge like castles from a sea of grass. Somewhere a leopard lies recumbent along the wide limb of a giant fig tree, while a cheetah perches sphinx-like on a termite mound, looking for a gazelle fawn to chase down. This is the last place on earth where you can see scenes of such abundance, yet it s only a fragment of our planet s past animal glories.
The fossil record allows us a glimpse of other times and other creatures equally as fascinating and awe inspiring as anything seen today, times when there were many more members of the cat family searching for prey among wild landscapes across the globe.
We are mesmerized by predators. There is a mixture of awe and fear, a reminder at some primal level of the time 2 million years ago when our ancestors emerged from the forest edges into the sunlight of the African savannahs, scavenging and killing prey for themselves. To do this they had to find ways of competing with the great cats and hyenas of that epoch. Little wonder, then, that we fear the large predators for their power while admiring them for their strength and courage. This ambiguous relationship between hunter and hunted is echoed in the hauntingly beautiful cave art of Lascaux and Chauvet in Europe - an artistic tradition that Mauricio Ant n so admirably continues with the artwork in his fascinating and informative Sabertooth . It takes a skilled observer with imagination to bring the past to life.
Who hasn t felt a thrill and fascination at the mention of sabertooths? Cartographers of ancient times inscribed here be dragons on early maps, conjuring up vivid images of giant reptiles living deep in the heart of Africa, in the same way that sabertooth tigers (as they were sometimes referred to) were the highlight of the Boys Own magazines and comics of my childhood. Something for youngsters to fantasize about; ripping adventures played out in the wilds of Africa and beyond.
I first came across Mauricio Ant n s eye-catching draftsmanship in a copy of his The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives when Angie and I were researching a series of books on Africa s big cats to accompany the popular television series Big Cat Diary . Mauricio s beautifully crafted drawings and paintings allowed us to step back in time to a very different era. If a love of the African savannahs has driven our own passion for wilderness and adventure, then imagine the thrill of taking a safari through the Pleistocence landscape of a million years ago - or further back still, to the Miocene of 20 million years ago that heralded the advent of the extinct relatives of our modern big cats.
The world of fossils and prehistoric life must by its very nature remain part of our imagination - something ancient and to a degree unfathomable. It takes the vision of an artist and the dogged determination of a detective, combined with the highest understanding of our current knowledge of anatomy and animal behavior, to conjure up illustrations that are both believable and awe inspiring. This is Mauricio s gift, and I particularly love his panoramas: colorful renditions of complete landscapes that suggest a dynamic and living storyboard of creatures and events from tens of thousands of years ago - millions, in some cases.
The largest and most famous of the sabertooth cats is Smilodon , an animal that was larger and more powerful than the largest living tiger and that roamed the American landscapes as recently as ten thousand years ago. Its saber teeth - curved, dagger-like canines - have been the source of speculation and inquiry into why such fearsome yet fragile weapons evolved and how they were used, questions that Mauricio Ant n attempts to answer in this book.
The natural world we live in is constantly evolving, molded by climate, soil, and competition between species through the process of natural selection. The wonder of the wild animals, plants, and trees we see today are its creation, as are the remnants of times past in the form of fossils. From these ancient fragments and a thorough knowledge of all these processes combined with the findings of the very latest DNA technology, Mauricio is able to take us on a journey of exploration to rival any modern-day safari.
Jonathan Scott
Preface
P
SABERTOOTH CATS ARE AMONG THE MOST POPULAR OF PREHISTORIC animals, yet surprisingly little information about them is available for the curious layperson. One particular genus, Smilodon , has exerted an intense fascination since its discovery, and it has been featured in children s books, cartoons and films. But there were actually many other genera and species of sabertooth cats, coming in different shapes and sizes. To define them in a single sentence, sabertooth cats are extinct members of the extant cat family (Felidae), and thus close relatives of our living cats but different from them in several ways - most notably in having spectacularly enlarged upper canines, but also in a series of anatomical features that point to a different hunting style.

Sabertooth cats are not the only subject of this book, because they were not the only sabertooths to exist. As used by paleontologists, the term sabertooth designates also several kinds of extinct predators that were not cats, or even close relatives of them, but that shared some or all of the distinctive anatomical adaptations of sabertooth cats. Nimravids, barbourofelids, thylacosmilids - each of these obscure names designates a wholly different family of predators that developed remarkably similar morphologies. Some were no taller than a domestic cat, others were larger than a lion, and some would have looked weird indeed. This book intends to review that diversity of sabertooths, cats or otherwise.
For specialists, sabertooths have posed some of the most baffling enigmas of paleontology, and there is still much to learn. What did sabertooths look like? Some reconstructions depict them essentially as lions or tigers with oversized fangs, while others show them as bizarre creatures not resembling cats, or any other living carnivores for that matter. How did they use their spectacular canine teeth? There have been many hypotheses about the predatory habits of sabertooths, ranging from theories that they would be utterly unable to hunt and would have been scavengers exclusively to those that they were capable of hyperviolent stabbing. And why did they finally go extinct? Some experts thought that sabertooths were victims of an irreversible trend, in which their canines became so big and cumbersome over the generations that they ultimately caused the demise of the last species. Others believed that sabertooths specialized in hunting gigantic, thick-skinned prey, and that at the end of the last ice age when many of those monsters vanished, so did the sabertooths - leaving the world to the faster normal cats, which were better adapted to hunt fleet-footed prey like horses and antelope. We will probably never be able to answer these questions with total certainty. But over the last few decades a lot of exciting research has been carried out that