Saber-Toothed Cat Fossils Discovered in Las Vegas

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Few people equate Las Vegas with science–well, statisticians aside–but the hills north of the city are home to a wealth of Ice Age mammal fossils, like mammoths, camels, and bison. But here’s a cool new find: a group from the San Bernardino County Museum in California have identified a pair of front leg bones from a saber-toothed cat, the Pleistocene’s best-known predator.

The fossils were unearthed in the Upper Las Vegas Wash, which is a well-known hotspot for fossils dating to the late Pleistocene. And while it’s the first saber-tooth fossils found in the area, it comes as no surprise that saber-tooth cats were living amidst all of the roaming edibles available at the time.

“We knew it had to be there,” Kathleen Springer, senior curator for the museum, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “There was all this amazing lunch everywhere.”

The fossils in question, courtesy San Bernardino County Museum

The site where the bones were found was first identified by Eric Scott, the curator of paleontology at the museum, in 2003, and these fossils were unearthed in June of this year. Scott told the Review-Journal that when he first got the leg fossils on a work table, he noticed something was off. After comparing them to mammals still alive today, he noticed that they looked like a mountain lion’s leg bones, but were much greater in size. After comparing them to reference fossils at the Page Museum in Los Angeles, Scott confirmed that he did have a pair of saber-tooth fossils on his hands.

It’s a rare find, much like the fossils of any predator. It’s due to simple numbers; there are far fewer predators, especially top-level ones like a saber-tooth, alive at any given moment than herbivores. For example, the African lion population is no more than a few tens of thousands, while there are over 1.2 million wildebeest in the wild. Those proportionately fewer numbers means proportionately fewer skeletons left to be preserved, and is why the saber-tooth fossils are such a cool find.

While the Review-Journal report doesn’t explicitly mention which genus of saber-toothed cat was found, it did mention that the research team dated the fossils to right around 15,590 years old, and combined with the location and the fact that Scott used the La Brea Tar Pits to find a reference, Smilodon seems like the most likely choice.

While saber-tooth predators are found in a number of biological families other than cats’ Felidae, (including saber-toothed marsupials), Smilodon species were indeed massive cats, with some species reaching 800 pounds or more. (But they aren’t saber-toothed tigers, technically, as saber-toothed cats belong to a different subfamily than those of either large or small cats living today.)

Smilodon fatalis, shown up top in an artist’s rendering, is a good representative of the genus. It’s distinctly a cat, but notice the short tail, longish neck, and overall stout, immensely powerful build. That build, combined with the insane slashing abilities of those famous teeth, was a prerequisite for taking down the large mammals roaming North America during the last ice age. And while there is debate over Smilodon‘s behavior, the current popular hypothesis is that they hunted in packs. (Paleo-pals, feel free to chime in.)

In any case, it’s a high-profile find, and while the public’s obsession with a few halo species can be of endless annoyance to researchers (why no fanfare for prehistoric American camels, eh?), finding a couple saber-tooth leg bones can do wonders in terms of outreach and awareness. I mean, show of hands: How many of you knew that Las Vegas was a paleontological hotspot? But I’m sure we can all agree on one thing: the Internet’s parasite-influenced cat obsession notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine anything cooler than a lion-sized cat with eight-inch fangs.

@derektmead