The Reason Why Saber-Toothed Tigers Went Extinct

Saber-tooth tigers. Cool, right?

Well, maybe. At first, it kind of seems like it would be pretty crazy if saber-toothed tigers still roamed the American wilderness. But just imagine for a second if you had to worry about giant fanged cats while you were camping. Forget putting your food in a bear locker you'd have to put your whole tent in one of those things. Yeah, saber-toothed tigers were cool, but their extinction pretty much made the whole camping and outdoor recreation industry possible.

But that begs the question: Why did they go extinct? It seems incredible to think that something as badass as a giant cat with teeth the size of your hand could ever be taken down by the forces of nature, but that's apparently what happened.

Just not the way we thought.

For a long time, it was believed that saber-tooth tigers died out because food was scarce. But scientists have now looked at the fossilized teeth from 15 saber-toothed tigers and found that they lacked the kind of wear pattern you'd expect to see in an animal that isn't getting enough to eat. According to the Huffington Post, a starving cat would likely gnaw every kill it found down to the bone, so its teeth would show a micro-wear pattern similar to what you see in hyenas, which are efficient scavengers that typically consume every part of a carcass from hide to skeleton.

That wear pattern is missing from sabertooth tiger teeth, though, so the big cats' extinction probably wasn't due to a scarcity of prey.

So what gives? Well, research by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA suggests that it was probably a combination of a warming climate and human activity. Interestingly, humans and saber-toothed tigers co-existed for at least a thousand years, and it was only when the climate started to rapidly warm that populations of megafauna oversized animals that include the saber-tooth tiger began to decline. After that warming event, much of the world's megafauna were extinct within a century.

But why? It's impossible to say for sure, but the big wild card seems to have been you guessed it! humanity.

Studies have shown that the migration patterns of humans and our now-extinct cousins like Neanderthals and Denisovans closely correlate with the decline of large mammals all over the world. As our ancestors and other human species migrated north to Europe and Asia, the average size of land mammals dropped by roughly half. The same thing happened when humans got to Australia, only on a larger scale Australian land mammals got about 10 times smaller. And in America, the average size of land mammals dropped from "mega" to "minuscule." Before human arrival, the average American land mammal weighed around 216 pounds. After early humans showed up and started waving their spears around, that dropped to an average of 17 pounds.

It's difficult to tell how much climate change may have also contributed. But according to The Atlantic, the decline of large mammals might have had something like a snowball effect, since, whenever there's an extinction event, it tends to irreversibly alter the ecosystems where those animals live. So once humans and hot weather combined to kill off a few key species, the rest may have tumbled like dominoes.

But since the study of sabre-tooth tiger teeth doesn't actually show any evidence that the loss of large prey animals directly led to their extinction, we're left to guess. One theory? Well, if large mammals were no longer around to eat, it's possible that sabre-tooth tigers may have turned to smaller mammals for food including humans. And if that happened, chances are humanity reacted by doing what it does best: killing every possible threat immediately.

So did humans hunt sabre-tooth tigers into extinction? For now, it's just another unsubstantiated theory and unless some brave soul invents a time machine and heads to the past to find out in person, it may just have to stay that way.

Sorry, sabre-tooth tigers! You were cool, and we're really sorry if we had to kill you.

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