It’s movie time!
This is incredibly cool, but the scenario seems unlikely (not least from the perspective of anyone who has ever given a housecat a bath):
https://youtu.be/4NKk7BYl0Rk&rel=0
Suspension of disbelief means ignoring the fact that, within ten seconds of hitting that water, an angry ball of fur, teeth, and screams would have exploded out of the cave exit up above, leaving in its wake a layer of match-sized wood splinters on the pond, and a bit of red mist on the rocky walls.
The encounter in Alpha might have happened —
https://youtu.be/f96ppJ3DSGE&rel=0
— but the YouTube page mislabels that cat as a sabertooth. It fooled me, too, at first; then I saw how the FX department actually had done a superb job showing that cave lion’s maneless head and long tail.
Sabercats had a short stub of a tail, for some reason.
Smilodon and Homotherium lived at the same time as cave lions (and vanished at the end of the last ice age along with cave lions and most other megafauna, except in Africa), but they were built differently and — here’s the important point — they weren’t even Panthera (big cats), let alone tigers.
They were in a whole different subfamily from tigers and other members of Family Felidae.
Living cats and their extinct close relatives are conical-toothed cats (subfamily Felinae).
Homotherium didn’t have long daggers, like Smilodon, but their saberteeth were very flat. (Image by James St. John, via Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0.)
Sabercats (and these go back long before there were Plio-Pleistocene ice ages) were knifetooths (subfamily Machairodontinae, now extinct).
There was something totally different from what we see in cats today going on with the Machairodontinae way of earning a living.
And we have no idea of what knifetooth fur was like, either. Enough sabercat DNA has been found in permafrost samples to prove that they were cats — just not Felinae — but no well-preserved adult specimens have been found yet.
They ranged all over the world, so some sabercats might have had stripes if it gave them an evolutionary advantage, but none of them were tigers.
They’re still labeled “sabertooth tigers” in many places online, though, and I couldn’t find a decent video explaining the difference.
So that leaves books and papers.
- If you can get these books through your library or care to buy the eBook, when available, I heartily recommend Antón and Turner’s The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives and Antón’s Sabertooth.
- This 2010 paper by Werdelin et al. has a bit more jargon but also has Antón’s artwork and it also goes into the whole history of cats and cat-like mammals and their evolution.
Some lagniappe:
Cave lion
Not only do we have eyewitness drawings of cave lions, we also have found some well-preserved cubs:
https://youtu.be/agVBUAx2PYs&rel=0
That’s interesting but rather grim. Let’s check out highlights from that BBC series on (true) tiger cubs a while back.
Tiger
https://youtu.be/s_8NoWpu-Ys&rel=0
Featured image: Erika Zimmer/Shutterstock
Flight To Wonder 