"social" Sabertooths Hunted In Packs, Study Says

[Guest Nicholas]

Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles, California

for National Geographic News

November 3, 2008

Unlike most of their fellow felines, saber-toothed cats were social creatures, living and hunting in formidable packs, according to a new study.

As always, this is a Nat Geo article... beware...

Find the article HERE!

[mommabetts]

Interesting

[Auspex]

"An abundance of sabertooth fossils in tar pits in present-day Los Angeles, California, suggests that the cats were pack scavengers, scientists say."

Weak. Opportunists, probably, but not necessarily social. All the predators and scavengers are over-represented there, and noone is proposing the same behavior for them.

[Guest Nicholas]

You see why my posts with Nat GEO come with warning labels...

Their articles present many weak statements, often with much fallacy. Presenting articles far too quickly without reasonable back checking, so they can have the story... FIRST.

As for the saber cats, I believe the correlation comes mainly from modern pride cats... The assumption is weak to say the least based on the evidence. I'd love to find some criticism from their peers in the field.

[PrehistoricFlorida]

I remember reading about a cave site in Texas where smilodon cat bones were found with debilitating injuries that were fully healed but that would've still prevented the animal from hunting for itself. The "pack" would obviously find food for this elderly/injured animal. There is a lot of evidence besides la brea that point toward smilodons being very social animals. Sorry I'm a bit vague on details of this site in Texas, but hopefully someone will pick up on this and know what I'm talking about. Dan?

[Guest Nicholas]

I remember reading about a cave site in Texas where smilodon cat bones were found with debilitating injuries that were fully healed but that would've still prevented the animal from hunting for itself. The "pack" would obviously find food for this elderly/injured animal. There is a lot of evidence besides la brea that point toward smilodons being very social animals. Sorry I'm a bit vague on details of this site in Texas, but hopefully someone will pick up on this and know what I'm talking about. Dan?

Thanks for the heads up, I'll research it a bit and see what I can come up with.

[Guest Nicholas]

An article which mentioned the above HERE!

"Evidence in the fossil record also suggests that the cats may have had a social structure. Some saber-tooth cat fossils have evidence of serious injuries, like broken bones and dislocated hips. However, the fossils also show that these injuries had time to heal or that the cats lived with them for a long time. Such injuries probably would have been fatal for solitary hunters. For this reason, some paleontologists suspect that healthy cats either actively provided injured cats with food or did not stop them from picking over freshly killed carcasses.

But not all researchers agree with this conclusion. Some argue that dehydration would have been a much bigger threat to injured animals than starvation, and there's no practical way for one cat to carry water to another. According to this theory, the cats may have lived off of stored fuel, like fats and proteins, while they allowed their injuries to heal."