IT HAD formidable teeth, but the sabre-toothed tiger鈥檚 bite scarcely did them justice.
Analysis of the skull of Smilodon fatalis, a heavily built cat that lived in North America until the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, reveals it could bite with only one-third of the force of a similar-sized modern lion.
A team led by Colin McHenry at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, ran CT scans on a sabre-tooth skull and a lion skull. From these, they created 3D computer models of the skulls which they used to test the forces that each could endure, and inflict. A 230-kilogram sabre-tooth could bite with a force of 1000 newtons, compared to the 3000-newton bite of a 250-kilogram lion, the team found (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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Modern lions kill large prey by clamping their teeth around their victims鈥� throats and maintaining this bite for up to 10 minutes, slowly suffocating the struggling animal. As a result, a lion鈥檚 skull must withstand huge forces. 鈥淲hen the Smilodon model was exposed to these forces, it lit up like a Christmas tree,鈥� revealing intolerable stresses that suggested it could not contend with flailing prey.
McHenry reckons the beefy sabre-tooth probably killed large animals by wrestling them to the ground and pinning their head, before making a deep killing bite to the throat.
