This Saber-Tooth Predator Was Likely One of The First True Carnivores

If you have ever lived with a cat, you know how painful it can be to get a bite.

42 million years ago, the teeth of cats would have looked very different, because they were only honing the teeth of cats to a deadly sharp tip for piercing and shredding flesh.

A new paper gives us new information about the evolution of modern cats and the earliest known cat-like predator in the west coast of North America.

The ability to eat an all-meat diet, also called hypercarnivory, isn't uncommon. polar bears can do it. If you have a cat at home, you may have a hypercarnivore. mammal were only figuring out how to survive on meat alone 42 million years ago.

One big advance was to evolve specialized teeth for slicing flesh.

Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae is known from a piece of a lower jaw with some teeth attached, but the teeth give us a lot of information about this ancient predator.

D. vanvalkenburghae is a member of the sub family of extinct cats called Machaeroidinae. This fossil is the most recent one found, and is vastly different from Apataelurus kayi.

Nothing like this had been seen before in mammals.

A few mammal ancestors had long fangs, but Diegoaelurus and its few relatives represent the first cat-like approach to an all-meat diet, with saber-teeth in front and scissor teeth in the back. Several animal groups have independently evolved in the millions of years since.

The jaw. The San Diego Natural History Museum.

The most famous saber-toothed cat is the Machairodontinae, which is one of the subfamilies that has evolved.

The jaw has been in the museum's collection since 1988, but was only recently analyzed by the team. This formation can give us information from a time when the world was warmer and California was a humid forest.

The Santiago Formation fossils show us a forested, wet California where tiny rhinos, early tapirs, and strange sheep-like, herbivorous Oreodonts grazed under trees.

Diegoaelurus would have been able to live the life of a specialized hunter before most other mammals because of the richness of prey species.

The only fossil of Diegoaelurus in the San Diego Museum collection, it is a little lonely, but as we dig deeper, we might discover even more sharp-toothed friends.

There is a 3D-model of the fossil that can be viewed here.