Sabers

[ashcraft]

On a slightly different topic, I have often wondered about sabers of big cats. I hear the experts proclaiming that they are too brittle for much lateral movement, so the prey had to be subdued in order to administer a surgical coupe-de-gras. The problem with that scenario is that if the prey had to be subdued, then sabers wouldn't be required, as you could kill them by any number of methods, so larger teeth wouldn't be selected for. Sabers are a recurring theme in land predators, from Gorgons, to nimravids, to thylacosmilus, to true sabertoothed cats, so there must be a selective forces driving this tooth lengthening.

Can anybody enlighten me?

Brent Ashcraft

[Auspex]

No enlightenment from me, but an observation that might be part of the answer (or at least spawn constructive discussion).

Could part of their utility have been for selection as a mate? Among the higher animals, adaptations that are seemingly disadvantageous persist because they bestow greater mating success upon the bearer.

[Ramo]

No enlightenment from me, but an observation that might be part of the answer (or at least spawn constructive discussion).

Could part of their utility have been for selection as a mate? Among the higher animals, adaptations that are seemingly disadvantageous persist because they bestow greater mating success upon the bearer.

That helps explain Dan's little fingernails, and his luck with finding good looking women to go fossil hunting with.

[Hawkeye]

Subduing prey and killing prey are two entirely different things. Most big cats kill larger prey by suffocation, biting the neck and causing asphyxiation. On a very large pret like a giant sloth, being able to subdue it is not necessarily going to be easy, but biting the neck and hanging on until the thing suffocates due to lack of air or bleeding into the lungs would be a little easier with giant canines. Maybe the canines got smaller as prey got smaller.

These are just guesses and may have nothing to do with reality.

[PaleoRon]

That's what I was thinking. It wasn't about killing the animal but how fast it killed the animal. The faster it got in, slashed the throat, and got out, the less likely it was to get injured by thrashing prey. If they hunted baby elephants, and I don't know if they did, they couldn't afford to wait for it to suffocate because other elephants would be coming to the baby's defense. If they could quickly deal a death blow and move away they could wait for the elephants to eventually move away and then move in to feast.

[ashcraft]

I don't know about the speed thing. Not all sabertooths were large, and surely not all were pack hunters, which would be required to subdue very large prey like elephants, sloths, whatever. Sexual selection is a possibility, but the females had large sabers also. Nimravids, a cat-like predator that filled many of the same niches as cats, before cats came in vogue, had sabers, and they didn't all deal with very large mammals, some where also small in body.

[tracer]

ok, i'm going to throw out a theory on the long canines, and it's based on nothing other than my own thinking, so it may have been already stated a bunch of times by others whose material i haven't read.

if the prey of those cats trended more toward more "fleshy" animals with larger, fatter, or thicker fat or muscle around the neck area, the longer canines may have helped the cats to more effectively "pinch" far enough down into the neck with enough pressure to close off carotid arteries or tracheas or whatever to cause unconsciousness and/or asphyxiation. if you picture trying to throttle someone (yeah, i know) with the thumb and fingers of one hand, using just your fingertips (like short teeth), it wouldn't work nearly as well as using your whole fingers to get a wider and deeper "bite", where you could try to touch your fingers to your thumb in the middle of the throat rather than more toward the surface.

am i making any sense, in a sick sort of way? i'm just thinking those cats hunted fat-necked critters and needed a big pinch.

so anyway, that's my theory. <looking around, noting the slightly frightened look on some faces>

what?

[ashcraft]

Ouch, kind of scary there tracer, but I have to admit, as you described the process in your regular fluid detail, I pictured my favorite 10th grader in your grasp.....pleasant for a moment.

I don't know about the fat neck thing. My whole beef with the saber thing is the "experts" saying that they are fragile, and so must have controlled the prey, and made a "surgical" bite, so as to miss the vertebrate, which would surely break the teeth. If you are controlling a prey animal that well, sabers aren't necessary, you could fart in their face until they died (once again picturing my favorite 10th grader).

In my mind that leads to two possibilities:

1)Sabers were selected for by another method, i.e. sexual attractant.

2)The experts are poo-poo heads.

Brent Ashcraft

[Auspex]

...you could fart in their face until they died...

"Worst case of stink-eye I ever saw, Nurse..."

[tracer]

Ouch, kind of scary there tracer, but I have to admit, as you described the process in your regular fluid detail, I pictured my favorite 10th grader in your grasp.....pleasant for a moment.

I don't know about the fat neck thing. My whole beef with the saber thing is the "experts" saying that they are fragile, and so must have controlled the prey, and made a "surgical" bite, so as to miss the vertebrate, which would surely break the teeth. If you are controlling a prey animal that well, sabers aren't necessary, you could fart in their face until they died (once again picturing my favorite 10th grader).

In my mind that leads to two possibilities:

1)Sabers were selected for by another method, i.e. sexual attractant.

2)The experts are poo-poo heads.

Brent Ashcraft

my guess would be #2, pun intended.

[tracer]

you know, i reread this stuff, and i'm asking myself why "scientists" think it's reasonable to believe a hugely muscular, almost bear-like cat, which must have preyed on large prey, had weak teeth for ornamentation? that makes no sense to me. and biting down hard on vertebrae isn't my sense of how the prey would normally have been immobilized anyway.

but bear with me on a strange analogy. most have probably seen the trick where if you squeeze a raw egg in your palm from end-to-end, you can't break it or it takes a great deal of force, but if you squeeze the sides it breaks easily. it has strength in the only direction that counts, so it can get from point A (can i say that anson?) to point B (the nest) without breaking. the sides need to be weak, so the chick can get out and oxygen transfer across the shell probably too, but i'm guessing.

so anyway, applying my analogy to your "sabers" - if the lower jaw serves as a support and prevents a lot of lateral pressure, and all the pressure applied by the cat is in an arcing line down the center of the saber, then the psi on the point of the saber could be huge with very little pressure laterally.

but anyway, i'm violating my own policy against speculative profundity. my guess is that the cats had guns.

[MarkGelbart]

Scientists have studied this.

Here's the best theory.

Smilodon was powerfully built and the skeletel injuries on their fossils are consistent with an animal that overpowered and wrestled its victims to the ground.

The sabers were then used to bite through the neck, severing the windpipe and the carotid artery, causing a quick death. Scientists have even experimented with a robotic mock-up of a saber-tooth jaw. These experiments show the sabers could slice through the underside of a baby proboscideans neck--something lions have difficulty doing. Evolution of the sabers was advantageous because they were readily able to kill prey other big cats could not. It was the sharpness of the sabers rather than the power of the bite.

This differs from the killing method of modern big cats which bite onto the windpipe and slowly asphyxiate their prey.

[Auspex]

The adaptation was successful, but now it is extinct. An examination on what changed around the time of their extinction might reflect clues as to what the saber's prior advantage might have been.

[earthdog]

Ouch, kind of scary there tracer, but I have to admit, as you described the process in your regular fluid detail, I pictured my favorite 10th grader in your grasp.....pleasant for a moment.

I don't know about the fat neck thing. My whole beef with the saber thing is the "experts" saying that they are fragile, and so must have controlled the prey, and made a "surgical" bite, so as to miss the vertebrate, which would surely break the teeth. If you are controlling a prey animal that well, sabers aren't necessary, you could fart in their face until they died (once again picturing my favorite 10th grader).

In my mind that leads to two possibilities:

1)Sabers were selected for by another method, i.e. sexual attractant.

2)The experts are poo-poo heads.

Brent Ashcraft

Am I the only one who feels sorry for this 10th grader ? (jk)

[ashcraft]

Scientists have studied this.

Here's the best theory.

Smilodon was powerfully built and the skeletel injuries on their fossils are consistent with an animal that overpowered and wrestled its victims to the ground.

The sabers were then used to bite through the neck, severing the windpipe and the carotid artery, causing a quick death. Scientists have even experimented with a robotic mock-up of a saber-tooth jaw. These experiments show the sabers could slice through the underside of a baby proboscideans neck--something lions have difficulty doing. Evolution of the sabers was advantageous because they were readily able to kill prey other big cats could not. It was the sharpness of the sabers rather than the power of the bite.

This differs from the killing method of modern big cats which bite onto the windpipe and slowly asphyxiate their prey.

True of smilodon, but he was not the first in the lineage. Sabertooths started relatively small in body size, then got larger, which many genus/families do. In other words, the sabers came first, for whatever reason, then size increased. It was body size that allowed them to feed on larger prey. Modern lions also wrestle their victims down, and then suffocate, as stated, and they don't have sabers, and they are a successful species. I don't know if their were enough elephant relative juveniles, and similar, to sustain a population of large carnivores. I just don't think we have the true picture of their hunting strategies, and why they did it that way. I believe there were also large round tooth cats competing with the dirk tooth cats for the same prey, weren't the american lion and smilodon contempararies?

I don't think there is a simple answer, but it is interesting to speculate.

Brent Ashcraft

[MarkGelbart]

True of smilodon, but he was not the first in the lineage. Sabertooths started relatively small in body size, then got larger, which many genus/families do. In other words, the sabers came first, for whatever reason, then size increased. It was body size that allowed them to feed on larger prey. Modern lions also wrestle their victims down, and then suffocate, as stated, and they don't have sabers, and they are a successful species. I don't know if their were enough elephant relative juveniles, and similar, to sustain a population of large carnivores. I just don't think we have the true picture of their hunting strategies, and why they did it that way. I believe there were also large round tooth cats competing with the dirk tooth cats for the same prey, weren't the american lion and smilodon contempararies?

I don't think there is a simple answer, but it is interesting to speculate.

Brent Ashcraft

Dinobastis was another fanged cat contemporary with Smilodon. It's known as the scimitar-toothed cat because its fangs were a different shape.

In Friesenhahn Cave in Texas complete skeletons of Dinobastis (formerly knowns as Homotherium) including kittens have been found in association with hundreds of milk teeth of baby mammoths, a few baby mastodons, and adult peccaries.

Paleontologists interpeted this finding and assumed the cave was used as a den by the scimitar-tooth and all the accumulated milk teeth were from victims of the cat.

[ashcraft]

In Friesenhahn Cave in Texas complete skeletons of Dinobastis (formerly knowns as Homotherium) including kittens have been found in association with hundreds of milk teeth of baby mammoths, a few baby mastodons, and adult peccaries.

Fascinating, do you happen to know the name of the authors or publication?, I think I would like that paper for my "library".

Brent Ashcraft

[MarkGelbart]

Fascinating, do you happen to know the name of the authors or publication?, I think I would like that paper for my "library".

Brent Ashcraft

(Evans, G.L. 1961) "The Friesenhahn Cave" Bulletin of the Texas Memorial Museum 2:1-22

I've been unable to obtain this publication. I got the info from this article second hand.

It's next to impossible to find a copy and purchase, but if you're able to make a trip to a university library in Texas you can probably find and copy it.

[ashcraft]

(Evans, G.L. 1961) "The Friesenhahn Cave" Bulletin of the Texas Memorial Museum 2:1-22

I've been unable to obtain this publication. I got the info from this article second hand.

It's next to impossible to find a copy and purchase, but if you're able to make a trip to a university library in Texas you can probably find and copy it.

Thanks, I doubt that I can get a copy, but I'll see......

Brent Ashcraft

[ashcraft]

(Evans, G.L. 1961) "The Friesenhahn Cave" Bulletin of the Texas Memorial Museum 2:1-22

I've been unable to obtain this publication. I got the info from this article second hand.

It's next to impossible to find a copy and purchase, but if you're able to make a trip to a university library in Texas you can probably find and copy it.

Supposedly you can order it directly through the museum. For $3 it seems like a deal. This is the site address for order info:

http://www.beg.utexas.edu/mainweb/publications/TMM.rtf

Brent Ashcraft

[MarkGelbart]

Supposedly you can order it directly through the museum. For $3 it seems like a deal. This is the site address for order info:

http://www.beg.utexas.edu/mainweb/publications/TMM.rtf

Brent Ashcraft

Oh wow, thanks.

I definitely want to read this one too.

[siteseer]

Am I the only one who feels sorry for this 10th grader ? (jk)

One thing to keep in mind is that the sabers are often, if not always serrated on the cutting edge. They may have also been bared in display but they were tools for sawing their way into flesh and sawing on the way out. That would allow for more devastating strikes.

Also, the full use of a cat's whiskers is not fully understood but they seem to have multiple sensing abilities. One sense that was noted in "The Big Cats and Their Extinct Relatives" is that when they have their prey held down, their whiskers close onto the prey and provide sensory information on where exactly to deliver the bite. All cats kill their prey with precise bites so it follows that sabercats would have killed that way too but the specific strategy applied to the prey of their time. Dogs and hyenas don't kill with precise bites, pretty much just chase and bite their prey until it tires. They hang on, then pull it down, and then they start eating it while it's still alive. They never evolved sabers.