Sabre-toothed cats in Alberta?
Scientist find fossils
MEDICINE HAT, Alta. — Scientists have found fossil evidence from the last ice age of a sabre-toothed cat in southern Alberta — the northernmost record of the predator.
A study by the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto was published Friday in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.
“We were describing the different cat fossils that were found in the Medicine Hat area in Pleistocene deposits,” said Ashley Reynolds, a graduate student at the Royal Ontario Museum who led the study as part of her PhD at the University of Toronto. “We found potentially four different species, (including) the Smilodon fatalis, which is the famous sabre-toothed cat.”
Reynolds said the sabretoothed cat is most commonly represented in popular culture, such as Diego from the children’s Ice Age movies and from the end credits of The Flinstones television cartoon.
Researchers also documented three other types of cats, including the American lion, a lynx or bobcat and potentially a cave lion. The fossil of the cave lion had previously only been found in fossils in Yukon and Alaska.
Supersized cats went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, which was about 11,000 years ago. They hunted large herbivores — such as camels, horses, giant ground sloths and young mammoths — that were also present at the time.
The sabre-toothed cat fossil is a partial bone of one of the cat’s large forepaws.
After reviewing the bone, which was first collected from the area in the late 1960s and later donated to the museum, it turned out that it was a sabre-toothed cat fossil.