Newly identified species of saber-toothed cat in North America during Miocene | Hacker News Reader

Newly identified species of saber-toothed cat in North America during Miocene

sciencealert.com

41 pointsBruceEel14 comments

Ancient relative of the Smilodon (which, as I now learned, is not a fantasy species):

> S. populator from South America was the largest species, at 220 to 436 kg (485 to 961 lb) in weight and 120 cm (47 in) in height

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon

odd... it says it has a body mass of 274kg..... but a tiger can be more than 300kg ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger )

Yes, the title is sensationalist... BTW: Tigers are big enough to sometimes hunt elephants (the smaller, asian kind), so hunting rhinos doesn't seem impossible.

And Smilodon Populator is described on wikipedia with a weight range of 220-436kg, so this is not a giant that's out of the range of what we already know.

It's still a big ol' cat though!

This reminds me of my favourite explanation of why many children are afraid of the dark; we are decended from hominids that were big-cat prey and are genetically predisposed to be hyperalert at night.

Isn't the fact that darkness effectively disables one of your most important senses, so that you can't tell what's going on, enough of an explanation?

Aren't you (as I know I am) afraid of writing code that you can't test, for example, despite our hominid ancestors' lack of computers?

I tend to think that may be why we're dormant at night. To keep off of the big cat's radar.

So a prehistoric Maine Coon, basically.

https://guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/longest-cat-(...

The biggest revelation to me is that dinosaur bones get auctioned off to private buyers. That one could purchase a T-Rex tooth for about $3k USD seems incredibly cool to me.

I hope that with genetic engineering techniques we will be able to reintroduce more species of cats.

Why?

I hope the 'parent' means "cats what became extinct due to man's stupid hunt practices" and not "Jurassic Park".

No animal can survive human's relentless attack, so re-introducing something that WE destroyed makes some sense.

Re-introducing something that evolution phased out, (imho - not an ethicist/biologist) is inappropriate. Also something 'out of its time' is not a nice thing to have. T-Rex made sense when there were other big-size herbivores to feast on. A pack of T-Rex now would hunt and feast on what?

Wasn’t if more climactic change that brought about their demise more than prehistoric people?

Older geological eras were the arena for really weird encounters, such as dwarf elephants vs giant swans (not making this up).

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