SABERTOOTH CATS

When I first started reading about sabertooth cats, I was shocked to learn that there are a whole bunch of different cat-looking animals with long, scary teeth, and they are all called sabertooth cats.  And I didn't know how I could ever find out about them all while doing my usual 15 minutes of in-depth research.  So Mom said I should just tell you about one sabertooth cat, which seemed like a good idea.  So the one I picked to tell you about is named Gertrude.  Hahahaha!  That was a joke!  Even though there really might have been a sabertooth cat named Gertrude.  But the one kind of sabertooth cat I am going to write about is named Smilodon fatalis.

The word smilodon comes from two Greek words that mean "chisel" and "tooth."  And the word fatalis comes from the same place as the word fatal, so we can tell just by the name of this cat that it can kill with its big chisel-teeth.  Luckily, the sabertooth cat has been extinct for about 10,000 years, so we don't have to worry about being attacked by one while we are out walking around the neighborhood.

A lot of people call these animals sabertooth tigers, but this is the wrong name for them because they are not really related to tigers.  All the different kinds of animals that are called "sabertooth" lived between 33.7 million and 9,000 years ago.  The Smilodon group are the ones we hear about most often because they lived in most of the U.S.  The canine teeth on these cats could be as long as 7 inches.  They were so long that they did not even fit inside the cat's mouth when it was closed.

Sabertooth cats were about the size of a lion, except they had a much heavier body, with shorter legs.  They were actually built more like bears than like cats.  Probably they could not run very fast, so the way they hunted was they stalked their prey and then jumped out and knocked it down with their heavy weight.  Sabertooths usually weighed between 600 and 750 pounds.  They had short tails and retractable claws.  Some scientists think that sabertooths might have been spotted, like leopards, because spots would have blended in best with the types of plants that were around in those days.

Nobody knows exactly how sabertooths lived, but they may have been social cats, like lions.  And the reason people think this is because (1) since they couldn't run very fast, it would be easier for them to hunt together to bring down big animals, (2) at the La Brea Tar Pits, a whole bunch of sabertooth fossils were found together, so maybe some of them came there together in a group, and (3) some fossils have broken bones that have healed, which makes scientists think that maybe the cats brought food to sick or injured members of their pack.

Sabertooth cats liked to eat big animals such as sloths, bison, deer, American camels, horses, and mammoths.  They may have got some of their food by scavenging, which would explain why they went to the La Brea Tar Pits and got stuck there while they were trying to eat mammoths and sloths that were stuck in the tar.  When they were hunting live prey, they probably brought the animal down with their weight, and then they used their long teeth to slash into the soft parts of the body so that the animal would bleed to death.

The long saber teeth were not good for crushing throats or spines or for holding onto an animal that was struggling.  If a sabertooth cat tried to do that, he would likely break off his teeth.  And actually, sabertooth cats didn't have very strong muscles for biting, like modern cats do.  Which is why they used their teeth for slashing.  And they had the advantage of being able to open their jaws really wide, like 120 degrees, and a lion can only open his jaw 65 degrees.

We don't know why the sabertooth went extinct, but it might have been because when the ice age ended, the environment changed, and a lot of big animals such as mammoths also went extinct.  The sabertooth was good at hunting big animals, but would not have been so good at hunting small animals because it couldn't run very fast.  I like to think this means that if a sabertooth cat saw a basenji and wanted to eat it, the basenji could outrun the cat.  But like I already said, we don't have to worry about that because the sabertooth cats are all extinct now.