I <3 paleontology

[tsaiko]

Sabertooth tigers hunted in packs.

True story: we were discussing the Rancho La Brea fauna in my Terrestrial paleo class. In particular, we were discussing how Smilodon brought down its prey. I forgot what prompted the comment, but my professor made the following remark:

"Well obviously they were going after big prey. You wouldn't expect to see a sabertooth cat lunge after a bunny. It's teeth would be stuck in the ground and the bunny would just hop out between them."

I loved my paleo classes. These are the same classes that produced the "Oh shit!" turtle story and the "Man, if only I have 20 hours in a day" line.

Comments

[tsaiko.livejournal.com]

Well there's a lot of debate as to what actually took out the larger animals. There's climate change, but Smilodon fatalis had been around for 1.5 million years at that point. It had already gone through several glacial/interglacial cycles as had most of the megafauna. Yeah the California plains dried out, but it wasn't the first time. What the heck was it that bumped them off the last time?

People probably. People come into an area and the first thing that happens is that most of the big species go extinct. You see this in Europe, Australia, South America, North America, and Africa to an extent.

So as it got warmer and the plants shifted, the larger animals were under pressure. People put added pressure on them, and they died off. Since Smilodon was so specialized - really, when the heck else is it going to eat with teeth like that but the large animals? - it died as well. I don't think it was necessarily "living on the edge" the whole 1.5 million years it was around.

[tanarill.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. I will go with that.

It reminds me of a poem I once wrote. The relevant lines are:

Man got to the
place where he could afford to be selfless
by climbing the stacked bones
of other species. Millions of years of them.