1. All cats, including Fluffy, have carnassials.
This isn’t a disease. It’s the reason why your cat sometimes eats with the side of its mouth.
Long, long ago, some ancient common ancestor of us all developed and passed along mammal genes for incisors, molars, and canines (a/k/a eyeteeth in us and fangs in Dracula and some animals).
Oddly enough, that genetic heritage comes with built-in evolutionary flexibility. In other words, we mammals can adapt our teeth for different uses as we evolve.
Over the last sixty-plus million years, members of the order Carnivora — cats, dogs, bears, and many more — have adapted their first lower molar and fourth upper premolar teeth into what are basically two scissors-style blades for slicing through hide and meat.
It’s a signature sign of order Carnivora.
Even pandas — bears that have somehow evolved into vegetarians (bamboorians?) — still have carnassials.
In the past, some predators evolved slicing blades out of different molars: the first upper and second lower molars in oxyaenids, for example, and second upper and third lower molars in hyaenodontids.
This makes identifying fossils a little easier for paleontologists.
The material that teeth are made out of is much harder than bone and lasts longer down through geologic time.
If someone finds a jaw fragment, say from the Eocene, it might be challenging to identify, but if it has carnassials, they at least know that it was a meat-eater.
If enough teeth are available, scientists might even be able to tell whether this was, say, a hyaenodontid or a carnivore (which would make them excited, since order Carnivora was developing around this time — the more fossils uncovered, the better scientists can understand where carnivores come from).
When cats showed up, some time in the late Oligocene to early Miocene, they soon took this to extremes (as cats do).
Dogs, bears, and most other carnivores have some flatter molars that are good for grinding up plants and other soft material.
Not cats.
The next time Fluffy yawns, you might be able to see that this (and all cats) have fewer teeth than dogs.
As they evolved, cats lost all teeth that weren’t useful in catching and processing meat. And these include those little scissors on each side of the jaw called carnassials!
2. Big cats: Tigers and clouded leopards both have the world’s longest cat fangs.
How can that be? It’s the same category — either you’ve either got the world record or you don’t.
Well, this isn’t Highlander. There can be two, if we factor in body size.
Bengal tigers are HUGE, with three-inch fangs — a length that leaves human dentists and the Guiness Book of World Records gobsmacked.
No other living cat species has such long teeth.
Another Asian cat — the clouded leopard — doesn’t get much over 50 pounds in weight, but its fangs are almost two inches long (for evolutionary reasons that scientists are still trying to work out).
If tigers had the same body weight-to-fang length proportions as clouded leopards, they would be sporting two-foot-long canine teeth (and would quickly starve to death).
Wow! Sabers!
Not so much, actually…
3. Scientists call today’s felines “cone-toothed” cats.
One glance into any kitty’s open mouth shows that the boffins are not lying, but why do they describe cats in such an odd way?
They do it for academic reasons (of course): to point out where today’s cats fit into the cat family tree. Biologists and paleontologists are all about evolution and lines of descent.
The rest of us might only think about cat teeth if Fluffy has dental problems or if a tiger with three-inch fangs is chasing us.
But there is common ground for us laypeople and the nerds experts in prehistoric life: those gorgeous, terrifying, but safely extinct sabercats.
There have been many different kinds of saber-toothed cat since Miocene times, but Smilodon is the most famous. Its dirk-like sabers are impressive, and just so many Smilodon fossils have been preserved at La Brea Tarpits in California.
The Page Museum has complete skeletons of Smilodon and Panthera atrox — a lion or lion-like cat that roamed North America during the Pleistocene and also quite often fell victim to the treacherous tarry seep.
The next time you’re there (or at another museum with the ever popular Smilodon/ice-age big cat display), check out those fangly teeth.
See how Smilodon’s are quite flat, compared to those — yes — conical fangs of the pantherine (a technical term for any member, living or extinct, of genus Panthera)?
Bonus points for noticing that Smilodon’s lower fangs are smaller than the pantherine cat’s or that the row of incisors in between upper and lower fangs arches outward more in the sabercat.
There are many other significant anatomical differences between all sabercats (not just Smilodon) and today’s line of cats — enough so that paleontologists have given sabercats their own group in the Felidae family tree: Machaerodontinae, the “knife-tooths” — extinct since the end of the last ice age.
Naming the last cat group still standing is a little trickier.
Some scientists refer to the two groups as Machairodontinae and Felini (not the director: one “L”), but that latter term sounds very much like “Felinae,” the technical name for today’s small cats, i.e., all those not in Panthera.
Relax. There’s no exam.
Now that we lay folk have seen how complex a job it is to seriously try to herd cats through the halls of Academia, we can just sit back and call the wild cats of modern Earth “cats.”
Sabercats deserve their own story and aren’t covered in this series of fangly facts, but many factual surprises about conical-toothed cats still await us.
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Featured image: Image by gagagabuschbusch from Pixabay
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Flight To Wonder 