Using detailed fossil comparison techniques, scientists have been able to identify a giant new saber-toothed cat species, Machairodus lahayishupup, which would have prowled around the open spaces of North America between 5 and 9 million years ago. One of the biggest cats ever discovered, M. lahayishupup is estimated in this new study to have a body mass of some 274 kilograms (604 pounds) or so, and possibly even bigger. It’s an ancient relative of the well-known Smilodon, the so-called saber-toothed tiger.
A total of seven M. lahayishupup fossil specimens, including upper arms and teeth, were analyzed and compared with other species to identify the new felid, with the fossils collected from museum collections in Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and California. Upper arms are crucial in these cats for killing prey, and the largest upper arm or humerus fossil discovered in the study was about 1.4 times the size of the same bone in a modern-day lion. That gives you an idea of just how hefty and powerful M. lahayishupup would have been.
“We believe these were animals that were routinely taking down bison-sized animals,” says paleontologist Jonathan Calede from Ohio State University. “This was by far the largest cat alive at that time.” Rhinoceroses would have been abundant at the same and may have been animals that M. lahayishupup preyed on, alongside camels and sloths significantly bigger than the ones we’re used to today.
Peering back so many millions of years into the past isn’t easy, and the researchers say that a more detailed saber-tooth cat family tree is going to be needed to work out exactly where this species fits in. The findings also open up some interesting evolutionary questions about these giant cats.
“It’s been known that there were giant cats in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and now we have our own giant saber-toothed cat in North America during this period as well,” says Calede. “There’s a very interesting pattern of either repeated independent evolution on every continent of this giant body size in what remains a pretty hyper-specialized way of hunting, or we have this ancestral giant saber-toothed cat that dispersed to all of those continents. It’s an interesting paleontological question.”
Excerpted from SCIENCE ALERT article by DAVID NIELD8 MAY 2021