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| credit: A. manzuetti |
A Researcher in Uruguay found in the storerooms of the National Natural History museum in Montevideo perhaps the largest Similodon skull ever discovered. Scientists knew that sabre-tooth cats could grow large,
but the skull indicates this particular Similodon populator weighed in at 960 pounds, or big enough to take down the largest Pleistocene herbivores approaching 3 tons in size, such as the giant ground sloth,
Megatherium. An amateur collector dug up the fossil in 1989 and donated it to the museum. Imagine a fierce feline predator twice the size of an African lion equipped with eight inch canines--a horrific image from the collective unconscious! The first arriving humans would have been all but helpless against such a massive apex predator.
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| art credit: m. anton |
During the Pleistocene, South America was home to three species of
Similodon as well as jaguars, lions, and
Arctotherium, the largest known bear on the planet. The rapid disappearance of megafauna in the Americas has been a puzzle for paleontologists, but new evidence points to
a combination of factors: human migration and climate change. A cat as big as
S. populator would need to feed on large animals like the giant armadillo that grew to the size of a VW car. When those began to die off due to habitat loss and human encroachment, its fate was also sealed--a lesson for our times.
