Sabre-Toothed Tiger Facts

Sabre-Toothed Tiger Profile

Most of the classic Paleolithic megafauna that we commonly learn about are enormous herbivores. 4-meter elephants, and sloths the size of a bus; giant horses and rhinos from the tundra. We seem to love the monsters. And the fact that there are simply more herbivores than carnivores compound the bias in the fossil record. 

But some monsters weren’t exactly giants. Some were simply monstrous by their appearance and ferocity. 

And some of these were given really cool names, like the Sabre-Toothed Tiger. 

Sabre-Toothed Tiger Facts Overview

Modern humans shared the Earth with some scary stuff, not least of all this enormous feline with fangs that have carried it through the ages into popular culture. But what were they for? The characteristic teeth seem too weak to handle much of a struggle and are unlikely to have been strong enough to fight with. 

So much about these terrifying predators remains uncertain, but it seems as though Smilodon may have been a social ambush predator, specialised for bringing down large bodies quickly and quietly.

Interesting Sabre-Toothed Tiger Facts

1. They’re not tigers, but who cares? 

Evolution has thrown a lot of sabre-tooths at the animal kingdom over the years. 

Weirdly, it’s a morphology that seems to have entirely died out, yet prehistoric ecosystems were riddled with them: sabre-toothed hyenas, sabre-toothed marsupials, and even sabre-toothed reptile ancestors. 

These terrifying teeth first evolved in carnivores some tens of millions of years before they showed up in felids (cats), and they evolved independently in various lineages at least seven times. The machairodonts, the group to which Smilodon belongs, were the last to evolve, and of all these sabre-tooths, none are particularly closely-related to tigers. 

As such, pedants have tried to push the renaming of this iconic beast toward a more accurate Sabre-toothed cat, but until these people address the nomenclatural abomination that is “ladybird”, we shouldn’t be paying them any mind. 

Technically, there were many genera of sabre-toothed cats, but the most famous, Smilodon is the one most we’ll focus on here. ¹

2. Their fangs are a topic of much debate

Canines seem to send people into a bit of a spin, both inside and outside the scientific world, and that’s because they mean so many different things to different animals. 

The canines of a hippo are up to 50cm long and aren’t used for eating at all. In baboons, large canines are only present in males, which suggests they’re also not related to diet. 

Some primitive deer species use canines as a defence because they never learned to grow antlers, and typically, in cats, large canines are for tearing large animals to pieces. 

So, the role of canines in the sabre-toothed tiger could be any number of things, and evidence that they’re rather delicate suggests that maybe they weren’t used for killing or fighting. 

The debate on their role has been going on for as long as the genus was known to science, and recent discoveries either add fuel to it or help to clear it up, depending on which side you’re on. 

3. They had a weak bite? 

One of the issues with the idea of using these huge canines to kill is the fact that the skull morphology shows us this cat has a relatively weak bite. 

Roughly a third of the force of a lion’s bite could be generated from the skill alone, suggesting that it wasn’t capable of tackling and slashing without risking damage to the teeth. This skull isn’t designed to handle the tension of latching onto a large fleeing animal. ²

4. They had wide mouths

However, Smilodon had a much larger gape than modern cats do, further suggesting the fangs were indeed for biting, and not merely for display. 

And when researchers factored in neck muscles to the bite-force equation, the estimate for how powerful the jaws were immediately doubled. ³

5. A bear-cat

In fact, Smilodon’s entire front half was built more robustly than is commonly seen in felids, with powerful bones in the forelimbs and chest, and this bear-like build adds more considerations to the detective work of how this predator hunted. 

Smilodon lived in a world of predators. Giant bears and dire wolves, huge cheetahs, and even the American lion would have shared its space, meaning there was a lot of competition for meat. 

While modern lions will often embark on lengthy, drawn-out attacks on their prey, it’s possible that Smilodon would have a much more rapid predatory strategy. 

The Smilodon’s powerful front limbs could have held its prey in place, and like a jaguar pouncing on Caiman, the wide gape and enormous teeth would then be able to sink into the braincase or spinal column of its victim. 

This strategy would have resulted in minimal struggle and minimal attention from the competition. ⁴

6. They weren’t necessary

The longer the teeth, the more prone they are to snap, and a lot of fossil remains of Smilodon show fangs that have broken off, likely as a result of a hunting accident. 

But they also show some level of healing over the break, demonstrating that the animal was able to live long enough to recover from the injury, and suggesting that they were still able to hunt without the fangs. 

However, this could also be evidence of something that is the focus of another debate around the spinal. ⁵

7. Were they social? 

Certainly, a social animal would be more likely to recover from an injury that limits its hunting ability. 

Social predators are well supported by their peers, and this gives them confidence when overhearing the distress calls of a prey animal. 

A solitary predator likely doesn’t want to get involved in someone else’s kill at risk of being harmed themselves, but a group of lions or hyenas is more or less unstoppable force, and will routinely steal kills from others. 

Huge numbers of Smilodon fossils are found in tar pits, into which large herbivores would have fallen, their cries attracting social predators. 

The prevalence of Smilodon fossils here is evidence to some that Sabre-toothed Tigers were a social lot, though they are shown to have relatively small brains, so they may just have been a bit too silly to avoid the pits. 

Possibly the strongest evidence of social sabre-tooths comes from a fossil of an adult cat with a birth defect that experts say would have prevented it from hunting at all. 

8. They probably ran out of food

Smilodon went extinct around 10,000 years ago, and this has been tied to a rapid reduction in large herbivores in its habitat. 

If this ambush predator was specialised for killing huge animals quickly, switching to more nimble and alert creatures would have been impossible, and with modern humans cleaning their plates from all the large mammals, populations of other predators would have struggled. 

Climate change from the Ice Age toward the more temperate, interglacial period, likely didn’t help the matter, as food for herbivores would have also become scarce in many regions. 

Smilodon, the last of the sabre-tooths, stopped providing us with bones around 10,000 years ago. ⁶

Sabre-Toothed Tiger Fact-File Summary

Scientific Classification

1. Paul Zachary Barrett (2021), “The largest hoplophonine and a complex new hypothesis of nimravid evolution”, Scientific Reports.
2. “Sabertooths Had Weak Bites, Used Neck Muscles to Kill”, National Geographic.
3. Victoria Gill (2011), “How a Smilodon sabretooth cat closed its gaping mouth”, BBC Earth News.
4. National Geographic (2014), “Jaguar Attacks Crocodile Cousin”, Youtube.
5. News Staff (2021), “Saber-Toothed Cats were Social Animals, New Study Suggests”, Sci News.
6. JOHN PICKRELL (2019), “Saber-tooth surprise: Fossils redraw picture of the fearsome big cat”, National Geographic.