No doubt about it: saber-toothed tigers are awesome. Or at least they were. These iconic creatures lived on this planet as far back as 42 million years ago and ate mammoths, elephants, and even rhinos. Ferocious hunters, saber-tooth tigers were more bear-like than cat-like, using their giant canines to deliver fatal wounds to some pretty large prey. So what happened to them? It seems unlikely that something as badass as a giant cat-bear with teeth the size of your hand could ever be taken down by the forces of nature, but that's pretty much what happened. Here's why saber-toothed tigers went extinct.
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00:00There's something pretty amazing about the saber-toothed tiger. From their instantly
00:04recognizable teeth to their terrifying size, this is a creature that conjures images of
00:08a world long gone, one as wild as it was dangerous. Even more remarkable, however, is the fact
00:14that they went extinct in the first place. So how did it actually happen?
00:18For a long time, people believed that saber-toothed tigers died out simply due to a lack of food
00:22in their habitats. This idea was later contested, though. Scientists looked at the fossilized
00:27teeth from 15 saber-toothed tigers and found that they lacked the kind of wear pattern
00:31you'd expect to see in an animal that isn't getting enough to eat.
00:34The starving cat would likely gnaw each kill down to the bone, so its teeth would show
00:38a micro-wear pattern. This would be similar to what's often found in hyenas, which are
00:42efficient scavengers that typically consume every part of a carcass, from hide to skeleton.
00:47As such, these big cats' extinction probably wasn't solely due to a scarcity of prey. So
00:52the question remains, why did the saber-toothed tigers die out?
00:56The researchers who authored the tooth-wear study didn't offer any alternative hypotheses,
01:01but later research by the Australian Center for Ancient DNA suggested that it came down
01:05to a combination of climate change and human activity. Interestingly, humans and saber-toothed
01:10tigers coexisted for at least 1,000 years, and it was only when the climate started to
01:14rapidly warm that the populations of megafauna began to decline. After that warming event,
01:19much of the world's megafauna died out within a century.
01:22Unfortunately, it's hard to know the exact process by which this happened. Studies have
01:26linked the decline of large herbivores to human predation, but most also agree that
01:30it's uncertain how much climate change might have had an impact, too. It's at least possible
01:34that the decline of large mammals also might have had something of a snowball effect in
01:39itself, since whenever there's an extinction event, it tends to irreversibly alter the
01:43ecosystems in which those animals live.
01:45What we do know is that humans and our now-extinct cousins seem to have had some kind of connection
01:49with the decline of large mammals all over the world. As our ancestors and other human
01:54species migrated north to Europe and Asia, the average size of the land mammals they
01:58encountered dropped by roughly half. The same thing happened when humans arrived in Australia,
02:03only on a larger scale. Australian land mammals became around 10 times smaller, and in America,
02:08the average size of land mammals dropped from mega to minuscule.
02:12Before human arrival, the average American land mammal weighed around 216 pounds. After
02:17early humans showed up and started waving their spears around, that dropped to an average
02:21of 17 pounds. It's easy to make the logical leap that the decline of these large herbivores
02:27would have left saber-toothed tigers with a fundamental problem. As the animals it depended
02:31on for food started to die off, starvation for the tigers would have become a very real
02:35threat.
02:36Since the evidence found on their teeth would suggest this didn't happen, however, this
02:40appears to be an indication that saber-toothed tigers were highly adaptable. When faced with
02:44starvation, they simply changed their diet.
02:46The smaller prey to which the saber-toothed tigers turned would have included smaller
02:50herbivores and birds. Considering these animals would have been difficult to hunt and kill,
02:54however, it's entirely possible that saber-toothed tigers turned to humans as their best source
02:58of alternative nourishment. And if that happened, it stands to reason that humans would have
03:02fought back, and started killing the big cats on sight.
03:05Coupled with a dwindling source of food, hunting by humans could have very well led to a rapid
03:10decline in the saber-toothed tiger population, until eventually, they died off for good.
03:14The fact is, though, you really can't take any of this as more than speculation. And
03:18since nobody seems to be inventing a time machine anytime soon, chances are we'll never
03:23know what really happened to the saber-toothed tigers.