Canada's First Sabre-Toothed Cat Fossil Found in Medicine Hat
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/sabre-toothed-cat-1.5305505
During the last ice age, huge cats bigger than an African lion prowled Alberta - including the fearsome beast commonly known as the "sabre-toothed tiger," a new study shows.
The proper name for the extinct predator with foot-long, serrated knife-like canines is Smilodon fatalis.
And up until the discovery of the fossil from Medicine Hat, Alta., the species had never been found further north than Idaho.
That's why a couple of small fossils caught Ashley Reynolds's eye as she was rummaging through the drawers at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
"What struck me is they were listed as being Smilodon from Alberta," recalled Reynolds, a PhD student in paleontology at the University of Toronto. "And I knew that Smilodon wasn't really considered to be a Canadian species."
[...] While Smilodon is often referred to colloquially as a "sabre-toothed tiger" - and popularized as such in The Flintstones and Ice Age - Reynolds said that's a misnomer, as sabre-toothed cats are just as closely related to housecats as tigers.
The bone found in Alberta is estimated to be 35,000 to 40,000 years old, from the Pleistocene epoch, before there were humans in the area.
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