South American Saber-tooth Cat

• GeneralIts 28 cm canines were fragile: it used them to cut the throat, not to bite through bone.
• Its canines, up to 28 centimetres long, were thin and fragile sideways on: it could not bite through bone, so it pinned its prey with the strength of its forelimbs and delivered a precise bite to the throat.
• It could open its jaws some 120 degrees, almost twice as far as a lion, in order to drive in such long fangs.
• It was the largest felid in South America and one of the largest ever to exist: up to 400 kg and some 120 cm at the shoulder, heavier than a modern lion despite a body of similar length.
• It was no runner. It had short, heavily muscled legs, a deep chest and a short tail: a body built for ambush, not pursuit.
• Carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis of the collagen in its bones from the Argentine pampas showed what it really ate: large open-country prey such as Macrauchenia and giant ground sloths.
• It is neither a tiger nor a close relative of today's big cats: it belongs to the machairodontines, a completely extinct subfamily of felids.
• It reached South America from North America in the Early Pleistocene, taking advantage of the Panama land bridge, and died out at the transition to the Holocene; the most recent South American remains are dated to between 10,935 and 11,209 years ago.

Skeleton type

Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (mammal)

Habitat and environment

Pampas, savannahs and open woodland of South America during the Pleistocene

Sources consulted: IUCN Red List · Animal Diversity Web · Wikipedia (es)