The sabertooth tiger is one of the most iconic extinct animals around. Along with the dinosaurs and the wooly mammoth, just about everyone has heard of these amazing creatures, which have been extinct for quite some time. Less famous is the sabertooth cat.
While we have learned a lot about them from finding bones and other fossils, there is still a lot of missing information that scientists wondered about. Recently, a remarkably well-preserved body of a juvenile saber-toothed cat was found, which provides lots of key information.
The body was found in the sub-zero temperatures of the Arctic permafrost of Siberia. It is more than 35,000 years old, yet it still has its fur, torso, limbs, and even its head intact.
While this find is certainly exciting, it means that the animal itself died after a short, but likely unpleasant life. The kitten has been shown to be just a few weeks old when it perished, and it had not yet developed the iconic long upper canine teeth that the species is best known for.
A study on this young cat was published in the journal Scientific Reports. In it, the authors wrote:
“The discovery of H. latidens mummy in Yakutia radically expands the understanding of distribution of the genus and confirms its presence in the Late Pleistocene of Asia.”
Finding this animal in Siberia is important because it expands the list of animals that lived in this area. It is already known that creatures such as wolves, cave lions, wooly rhinoceros, and many other animals lived and died here, which means there are plenty of well-preserved remains to be found.
It is also known that Neanderthals and Denisovans lived in the region. This gives hope to some that their remains will be found intact, which could help shed a lot of information on the ancient ancestors of humans.
This sounds like a great place to search for remains.
If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?
