Formidable kitty: Was the sabre-tooth a pack hunter?
Credit: U.S. National Park Service
Carbone and his team argue that re-interpreting these finds in light of the African experiments indicates that sabre-tooth cats occupied a niche of large social carnivore, similar to the lion today.
"Some have argued that Smilodon was solitary because most cats are, and because males and females were similar in size, which is not what we see in the social lion," said co-author Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"Also [the sabre-tooth's] brain is somewhat smaller for its body size than might be expected for a social animal," she said.
Social cues
However, other evidence – such as the fact that sabre-tooth remains are more numerous than some social animals and that many sabre-tooths appeared to have survived serious injuries that would have impaired their ability to hunt – is stacking up in favour of the idea that they hunted in packs.
"This is an interesting piece of work and certainly does produce evidence suggesting that sabre-toothed cats may have been social," commented Hamish McCallum an expert on the marsupial carnivores at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia.
McCallum speculated that if the sabre-tooths were social animals then their unusually large teeth may gave been for social or sexual signalling rather than to help them catch prey.
The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.
