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?
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| 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 fatalis. S. 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.
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| 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
Just think if Homotherium had developed thumbs...whoa, that's even SCARIER!
ReplyDeleteVery cool. I always learn something on your blog.
ReplyDeleteThere have been several lines of cats that have evolved scimitar or saber teeth - we really need to breed a dosmestic version.
ReplyDeleteThat's so interesting! You always find such fascinating feline history to share with us!
ReplyDeleteWe knew there was a reason to never argue with a cat! :)
ReplyDelete