Fossils from cat with ‘steak knife’ fangs, found in Yukon, give researchers something to gnaw on
A integrate of singular fossils found in Yukon have scientists falling their teeth into a puzzling story of a once-formidable predator  — a scimitar cat.
And according to new research published in a biography Current Biology, a fossils advise a now-extinct animal once ranged opposite a Northern Hemisphere.
“There’s usually about 20 fossils that have ever been found of this cat in Alaska or Yukon, and that’s in over 100 years of hoary collecting,” pronounced Yukon supervision paleontologist Grant Zazula.
“It’s kind of an conundrum … we don’t know a lot about this animal.”
Teeth like beef knives. (Binia de Cahsan)
What researchers do know is that scimitar cats were a things of nightmares — built to kill, with prolonged front limbs and brief behind limbs. “Good for pouncing,” Zazula said. That total with large, serrated fangs.
“Imagine your residence cat with beef knives entrance out of a mouth, though it’s about 400 pounds,” Zazula said.
“This is a bend of a cat family tree that fundamentally diverged — it went off on a possess trail on a family tree about 20 million years ago — and they’re totally apart to all vital cats today.”
Mining for fossils
The dual Yukon fossils that became a concentration of a latest investigate were found decades apart, on mining claims on a Sixty Mile River, and Dominion Creek. Studied alongside other scimitar cat fossils, researchers now trust North American scimitar cats were a same class as a European ones.
Previously, scientists believed there were apart class on a two continents.
‘These fossils that we find in a Yukon … have tellurian significance. They’re not only things that finish adult on dry shelves,’ pronounced Yukon supervision paleontologist Grant Zazula. (Wayne Vallevand/CBC)
“We now know, genetically, this was one wide-ranging class that lived all a way, basically, from England to Texas,” Zazula said.
The new investigate is only another instance of how Yukon, abounding in ice age fossils, is personification an outsized purpose in paleontological research, Zazula says.
“These fossils that we find in a Yukon … have tellurian significance. They’re not only things that finish adult on dry shelves,” he said.
“For me, it’s a genuine honour to be partial of that, and be a small man from a Yukon removing a possibility to kind of rivet in a general systematic universe since of a cold things that we have in a belligerent here.”
Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/yukon-scimitar-cat-fossils-paleontologists-1.4372037?cmp=rss