Sabertooth Tiger Cat

A saber-toothed tiger's canine teeth could reach up to seven or eight inches in length. The saber-toothed cat mostly hunted large, slow-moving animals, like sloths, and even young mammoths or possibly even humans. This ambush hunting style helped saber-toothed cats survive throughout the Americas. They spread from coast to coast, from

Though related to modern cats, the sabertooth was no more a tiger than it was a cute kitty. And there was certainly nothing cuddly about Smilodon fatalis. The name means deadly knife tooth, but the precise purpose of these finely-serrated fangs is still a mystery. Smilodon first shows up about two million years ago.

sabre-toothed cat, any of the extinct catlike carnivores belonging to either the extinct family Nimravidae or the subfamily Machairodontinae of the cat family .Named for the pair of elongated bladelike canine teeth in their upper jaw, they are often called sabre-toothed tigers or sabre-toothed lions, although the modern lion and tiger are true cats of the subfamily Felinae.

The saber tooth tiger is one of the most widely known species of saber toothed cats from the genus Smilodon. This extinct cat was named for the pair of elongated teeth in its upper jaw. The saber tooth tiger was found across North and South America during the Pleistocene Epoch. It went extinct approximately 10,000 years ago.

Those carnivores included Smilodon, better known as the saber-toothed tiger and its lesser-known cousin Homotherium latidens, the scimitar-toothed cat.While these are two of the most iconic saber-toothed cats of the Americas, the first of which emerged during the Eocene some 56 million years ago, they're far from the only iterations of saber-toothed animals.

This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 7 June 2025. Extinct genus of saber-toothed cat Smilodon Temporal range Early Pleistocene to Early Holocene, 2.5-0.0082 Ma Pre O S D C P T J K Pg N Mounted S. populator skeleton at Tellus Science Museum Scientific classification Domain Eukaryota Kingdom Animalia Phylum Chordata Class

The quotsaber-toothed tiger,quot Smilodon, is the California State Fossil and the second most common fossil mammal found in the La Brea tar pits. The name quotsaber-toothed tigerquot is misleading as these animals are not closely related to tigers. Hoplophoneus is another type of saber-toothed cat classified in the Felidae or true cat family. This

Saber toothed tigers are an extinct species of cat characterized by their long, curved canine teeth. They also carry the names saber-toothed cats, saber-toothed tigers, or simply their genus name Smilodon.. While there were other similar large-canine cats, Smilodon had the longest teeth. There are three known species, S. fatalis, S. gracilis, and S. populator.

Scientists are unsure why this site attracted so many saber-toothed cats, but some suggest these cats may have been scavengers rather than hunters. Smilodon had enormous canines, or quotsabers,quot which protruded inches below its chin line when its jaws were closed. In order to stab its prey, the saber-toothed cat had to open its lower jaw to a 95

The most distinctive features of Smilodons are their pair of large upper canine teeth that was around 28 cm long in S. populator, giving them the colloquial name 'saber-toothed cats'.Out of the two types of such cats, viz. the short, broad-canine 'scimitar-toothed', and the longer, slender-canine 'dirk-toothed', the smilodons fall under the latter type.