A note about The Cuddlywumps Chronicles

This blog is written and maintained by Miss Cuddlywumps, a fluffy-tailed calico cat who is both classically educated and familiar with mysteries. She receives creative input from the Real Cats and clerical assistance from She of Little Talent (old SoLT, a.k.a. Roby Sweet). Comments or complaints should be addressed to Miss C rather than to old SoLt (Ms. Sweet). Ms. Sweet accepts no responsibility for Miss C's opinions.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Prehistoric Cat News: Saber-Toothed Cats Lived in Europe Longer Than We Knew

Cats in History


An interesting news item flashed across our computer screen last week, concerning new findings on ancient cats. Big cats. With big teeth. It seems that some of these cats in Europe went extinct hundreds of thousands of years later than previously thought, and that means these cats could still have been around when modern humans stepped foot onto the European continent.

What cats are we talking about?

Homotherium compared to human. That's a big cat!
Homotherium, with human for size comparison.
By Dantheman9758 at English Wikipedia [CCBY 3.0], via WikimediaCommons.
The cats in question are called Homotherium (that’s their genus name). They were lion-sized saber-toothed cats that originated in the Old Word and also lived in the New World. They were related (but quite distantly, it turns out), to what you probably think of when you think “saber-toothed cat”—Smilodon fatalisS. fatalis is the species whose remains have been found in California’s famed La Brea Tar Pits. In North America, both Homotherium and Smilodon are known to have survived until the Late Pleistocene, or until about 10,000 years ago.

The picture is different in Europe, though, where Homotherium was thought to have disappeared by about 300,000 years ago.

New study finds new dates

But that old picture changed recently, with the results of an ancient-DNA study. A team led by Johanna Paijmans of the University of Potsdam in Germany examined DNA from a unique fossil: a Homotherium jaw bone found in the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands that has been firmly dated to just 28,000 years ago (which, you’ll notice, was many, many thousands of years after the cats were thought to be extinct). Their work confirmed that the fossil is in fact from Homotherium, which means that these cats were living in Europe a lot longer than we knew. And that means that "when the first anatomically modern humans migrated to Europe, there may have been a saber-toothed cat waiting for them," Paijmans says.
Homotherium reconstruction. These cats survived in Europe many thousands of years longer than previously thought.
Homotherium reconstruction.
By Sergiodlarosa (Own work) [CCBY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia  Commons.

Just imagine that welcoming committee!

And by the way, why are we telling you this? Well, because we cats all have a common ancestor from way back in the distant past, and that means that Homotherium is the (extremely) distant cousin of your housecat. Just think of that next time you're telling your cat it's not time to eat yet!

Source

Current Biology, Paijmans et al.: "Evolutionary History of Saber-Toothed Cats Based on Ancient Mitogenomics" http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31198-3 , DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.033

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5 comments:

  1. Just think if Homotherium had developed thumbs...whoa, that's even SCARIER!

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  2. Very cool. I always learn something on your blog.

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  3. There have been several lines of cats that have evolved scimitar or saber teeth - we really need to breed a dosmestic version.

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  4. That's so interesting! You always find such fascinating feline history to share with us!

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  5. We knew there was a reason to never argue with a cat! :)

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