When people arrived in Europe, big cats with bigger teeth were possibly waiting for them.
Sabre-toothed cats were still prowling through Europe 200,000 years later than previously thought, new analysis has found.In a paper published in the journal Current Biology, a team led by Johanna Paijmans, of the Institute for Biochemistry and Biology, at Germany’s University of Potsdam, presents partial mitochondrial genomes for three sabre-toothed cats from the genus Homotherium (members of which were widespread across Eurasia and the Americas), and one from another sabre-toothed genus, Smilodon.
Among the Homotherium fossils was a jawbone that was found in a trawler net in the North Sea in 2000 and identified by shape two years later as belonging to a sabre-toothed cat.
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That is one scary cat.
ReplyDelete:) I was fascinated with them when I was young.
DeleteOh yea, man is what wiped out a lot of these big animals.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't surprise me if Europeans had intentionally wiped sabre-tooths out, with the dream that such would make for a more pleasant world.
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Giant ostrich-type "elephant birds" were wiped out in Madagascar in the 17th or 18th century (supposedly).
Woolly mammoths according to wikipedia: "Isolated populations survived on St. Paul Island until 5,600 years ago and Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago."
I'm with the "Left" here really: I'd prefer to preserve these creatures. Ah, sabre tooths maybe could be "preserved" on whatever island the Jurassic Park movie was filmed on :p Alligators should be "preserved" somewhere isolated too, well away from me.
Many foreign polities have to deal with monkeys still today, not only predators. India seems to want to preserve creatures, though its population and pollution is also booming...
sabre-tooths
DeleteWhen I was a kid I heard that their teeth became so long that they couldn't feed anymore! :)