Two skulls mounted for sale, on the left the walrus and on the right one of the sabre toothed cats Hoplophoneous. Ignore the disproportionate sizes and look at the shape of the tusks verses the sabres, if you don't see what I mean try another image of walrus tusks... | |
Note the shape and particularly the grooves down the tusks and spot that the same grooves are on the cat's teeth. The same grooves are found on our own metal daggers to increase the dagger's strength to weight ratio and to allow the suction created when the dagger is being pulled out of wet flesh to be released. That the teeth of sabre toothed cats should resemble our own killing implements only seems to reinforce the argument that these animals were the most formidable predators. But why should the same form be found on the teeth of a mollusc eater? |
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Finally on the similarities between the sabre toothed cats and walruses, much is made of the jaw morphology of these cats in that the lower jaw seems to have been able to swing open a very long way. There are palaeontologists who have matched the jaw and teeth spacing of various sabre toothed jaws to the necks of individual prey animals. And yet a glance at the walrus skull seems to suggest that a walrus's lower jaw can also swing open beyond 90 degrees - why? | |
So what am I saying here? Well in truth I'm not sure. Certainly noting the similarities between a walrus's tusk and a sabre toothed tiger's sabre gets me no nearer to answering the original question about sabre toothism i.e. why would such delicate teeth that were probably an encumbrance to hunting develop separately at least four times in three orders of mammals? |
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And certainly I can see the logic behind connecting predator tooth shapes to prey neck shapes, indeed such specialisation neatly explains the demise of the sabre toothed cats in a time of global warming at the end of the last ice age (see above). | |
But I look at the pictures of walrus skulls
on the web and I doubt the belief that the sabre toothed carnivores are
extinct!! In my maddest moments I think that sabre toothism did not arise twice in the Carnivora Order but three times. That one of those sabre toothed animals lives in the Arctic today and eats molluscs. And that since this animal does not prey on large animals sabre toothism can not be a function of hunting!!!!! |