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The last of the great sabercats died out with the close of the Ice Age. Their disappearance ended 23 million years of cats with impressively long canines. So long, Smilodon. Hasta la vista, Homotherium. But these fierce felids weren’t the only animals to evolve saber fangs.
Long before the fierce felids were creodonts – a totally extinct group of mammalian carnivores – and the earliest true sabercats, known as machairodonts by researchers, overlapped in time with more closely-related pseudo-cats called nimravids. There was even a marsupial sabertooth named Thylacosmilus. Yet, whether creodont or marsupial, nimravid or machairodont, paleontologists have struggled to understand sabertoothed predators because these carnivores left no descendants. For the first time in millions of years, our world is missing saber-fanged superpredators.
But there may be sabertooth facsimiles. Two very different mammals may allow researchers to catch a fleeting glimpse of how long-fanged predators hunted and struck their prey.
In 2006, anatomist Per Christiansen proposed that living clouded leopards independently evolved aspects of their teeth, skulls, and biting abilities that are quite similar to those of true sabercats....
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