Scientists analyzed the teeth of the saber-tooth cats and found that the big cats had plenty to eat and fed on animal carcasses until they became extinct, reports news.vanderbilt.edu.
Saber-toothed cats and American lions were found in North America in the late Pleistocene age before they went extinct 12,000 years ago. A team of scientists led by Larisa DeSantis a palaeontologist at Vanderbilt University, looked at the teeth of the big cats that lived 30,000 years ago and compared with the most recent samples from around 12,000 years ago, just before they went extinct.
To their surprise, there were no differences found in the diet of the saber-tooth cats over the entire period of time which contradicts with the previous theory that the extinction of these cats was due to starvation.
"The popular theory for the Megafaunal extinction is that either the changing climate at the end of the last Ice Age or human activity - or some combination of the two - killed off most of the large mammals," said Larisa DeSantis, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt, who headed the study, according to news.vanderbilt.edu. "In the case of the great cats, we expect that it would have been increasingly difficult for them to find prey, especially if had to compete with humans. We know that when food becomes scarce, carnivores like the great cats tend to consume more of the carcasses they kill. If they spent more time chomping on bones, it should cause detectable changes in the wear patterns on their teeth."
Other theories show that the extinction of these big cats was due to various factors such as climate change and few other studies also suggest that competition with humans for their prey lead to the extinction. But it is most certain that the extinction of the saber-toothed cats was not due to starvation.
"The net result of our study is to raise questions about the reigning hypothesis that "tough times" during the late Pleistocene contributed to the gradual extinction of large carnivores," DeSantis said. "While we can not determine the exact cause of their demise, it is unlikely that the extinction of these cats was a result of gradually declining prey (due either to changing climates or human competition) because their teeth tell us that these cats were not desperately consuming entire carcasses, as we had expected, and instead seemed to be living the 'good life' during the late Pleistocene, at least up until the very end."
These findings are published in an online journal PLoS ONE.
