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That’s a nice Halloween pose, but in the Pleistocene world, Panthera atrox — the scientific name for this American “lion” — kept its fearsome fur suit on as it roamed through North America.

So did Panthera spelea — the cave lion and movie star (it has a long tail; it’s not a sabercat) — over in Eurasia.

Eurasian people were fascinated by their catty neighborhood terror:

Not all paleontologists agree with those DNA findings. Some still say that P. spelea was closer to tigers than to modern lions; some insist that P. atrox was an ancestral jaguar.

In terms of actually ruling, no one knows for sure how Pleistocene big cats interacted with Smilodon and Homotherium.

Behaviors don’t fossilize.

According to some of the papers I have read, one clue might be the teeth: sabercats couldn’t kill prey with a neck bite as lions and other cats do now, so perhaps the two groups hunted prey in different, noncompetitive ways and coexisted.

If their relationships resembled those of today’s feline apex predators — jaguars amd pumas in South America, for instance — it probably was a case of lions ruling at some times, and sabercats at others.

But everyone, from today’s boffins to Neolithic cave artists, agrees that these pantherines had charisma.

Here is one more video on them:

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Lagniappe:

These cubs are not frozen. ❤

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Featured image: James St. John, CC BY 2.0.

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