Saber Tooth Cats

Saber tooth cats might sound amazing, but you wouldn’t like to come face to face knowing how they looked and what they eat!

A saber tooth cat had orangey fur, no mane, big head and powerful paws. A saber tooth cats were one metre tall and one hundred twenty cm long. And of course they had teeth that were up to twenty cm long.

Stabbing their teeth into the prey they could easily kill it. They hunted most animals of the ice age including wild horses, yesterday’s camels, deer, pronghorn antelopes, and giant ground sloths. Sometimes if their long teeth hit a hard bone the teeth broke.

Saber tooth cats lived about 40 000 years ago in Africa, Europe, and North and South America. Saber tooth cats did not migrate or hibernate; they always stayed in the subtropics.

A saber tooth cat’s baby is called a cub. It was not unusual that male saber tooth cat would kill another male’s cubs.

There were more than one hundred fifty different types of saber tooth cats. Such as: Smildon (SMILE – o – don)—the most famous, Hophoneus, Dinictis, Homotherium, Thylacosmilus, Metailurus, Machairodus, Megantereon, Dinofelis (“terrible cat”), Paramachairodus—oldest of the cats, and Xenosmilus (“strange knife”). Saber tooth cats lived in bands or herds (Bands and Herds mean the same).

All what we know about saber tooth cats was discovered by scientists. The biggest place where they found saber tooth skeletons is in California.  It is called La Brea Tar Pits. Some animals what they found had broken bones and diseases. They survived eating other animals stuck in the tar.

I am still so surprised about how much information I’ve collected. I have a lot of unanswered questions like some that are listed here: are house cats just a smaller and not that dangerous version of a saber tooth cat? Are they related? Why did the saber tooth cats extinct? There are many more questions that I have. If I listed them here it’ll probably take about the rest of this page to write them down.