What might be the ultimate discovery in our understanding of extinct cats – the partial, mummified body of a sabre-tooth – has been announced from the Ice Age permafrost of Yakutia in far eastern Siberia, Russia.
Published in Scientific Reports by A V Lopatin of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and colleagues, the specimen was discovered in 2020 on the banks of the Badyarikha River in the Sakha Republic.
Carbon dating shows it to be about 31,800 years old and thus from the Late Pleistocene. It consists of the front part of the body and head as well as bones from the hips and hindlimbs. When complete, the whole animal would have been just 35 cm long.
Sabre-toothed cat cub
Anatomical details of the skull identify the cub as a specimen of Homotherium latidens, a sabre-toothed cat originally described from the UK and later reported from Pleistocene sites across Europe and Asia.
Other homothere species are known from the Americas and Africa. They were lion-sized, long-legged cats whose serrated upper canines were strongly flattened from side to side. They’re sometimes called scimitar-toothed cats.
The Badyarikha cub is the latest in a list of Pleistocene animals recovered from Siberian permafrost, many of which have been announced in the media but not yet subjected to scientific study. In addition to woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos, they include wolves, brown bears and cave lions.
A closer look
By comparing the cub’s teeth and bones to those of modern lion cubs, Lopatin and colleagues estimate that it was three weeks old at death.
The head is short and rounded – more so than in a lion cub – and the ears are rounded and high on the head. The neck is longer and thicker than that of lions, which confirms conclusions made previously on the basis of sabre-tooth neck bone anatomy.
A longstanding question concerns how visible homothere canines were in life, and a recent argument made by specialists is that the lips and skin around the jaws concealed the teeth when the mouth was closed. The cub is unfortunately too young to possess the enlarged upper canines these cats are famous for, but its upper lips are much deeper than they are in lions. This supports the idea of concealed canines.
Several of the cub’s features are surprising and couldn’t have been predicted from previously known fossils. Long, pale tufts of hair extend backwards and downwards from the corners of the mouth, raising the possibility that these features were more accentuated in adults: perhaps they even had a beard-like extension covering part of the lower jaw.
Its paws are broad and the pads underneath each digit are square, rather than oval as is more typical in cats. The main pad underneath the palm is broad and kidney-shaped, and lacks the trilobed rear margin familiar in cats today, and a wrist pad typical of modern cats is lacking altogether. These paw details are all suggestive of heat conservation and imply that homotheres were specialised for walking in snow.
Of great interest is that the pelt is dark brown, with paler areas on the lower jaw and perhaps the paws. This might mean that adults were similarly plain and dark, or it could be that cubs and adults differed in colour and markings. In some modern mammals – the spotted hyena is a classic example – cubs are dark brown while adults are light-coated and spotted. We won’t know either way until adult specimens preserving part of their pelt are discovered.
For years, experts have hoped that additional Pleistocene animals quite different from those of today might be discovered in permafrost, and the finding of an intact sabre-tooth is a hugely significant, but not unexpected, find. More is surely set to come… an inevitable and alarming consequence of climate change and the rapid warming of previously frozen environments.
Find out more about the study: Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia
Main image: Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens/Image cropped/A V Lopatin/Scientific Reports, 2024 (CC BY 4.0)
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