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posted by martyb on Friday October 04 2019, @08:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the cat-in-the-hat dept.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/sabre-toothed-cat-1.5305505

During the last ice age, huge cats bigger than an African lion prowled Alberta — including the fearsome beast commonly known as the "sabre-toothed tiger," a new study shows.

The proper name for the extinct predator with foot-long, serrated knife-like canines is Smilodon fatalis.

And up until the discovery of the fossil from Medicine Hat, Alta., the species had never been found further north than Idaho.

That's why a couple of small fossils caught Ashley Reynolds's eye as she was rummaging through the drawers at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

"What struck me is they were listed as being Smilodon from Alberta," recalled Reynolds, a PhD student in paleontology at the University of Toronto. "And I knew that Smilodon wasn't really considered to be a Canadian species."

[...] While Smilodon is often referred to colloquially as a "sabre-toothed tiger" — and popularized as such in The Flintstones and Ice Age — Reynolds said that's a misnomer, as sabre-toothed cats are just as closely related to housecats as tigers.

The bone found in Alberta is estimated to be 35,000 to 40,000 years old, from the Pleistocene epoch, before there were humans in the area.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 04 2019, @10:59PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday October 04 2019, @10:59PM (#902846) Journal

    It's not something that's often mentioned about that part of the world, but it is a paleontological paradise. If you have an interest in dinosaurs, fossils, or ancient mammals there are plenty of cool places to visit in an arc from Medicine Hat down through the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota and Montana.

    In fact, Dinosaur Provincial Park, a couple hours' drive northwest from Medicine Hat, is well worth a visit. It's a badlands-style terrain that appears suddenly as you drive up to the entrance. They have built glassed-in sheds over some partially excavated fossils along the trails and car routes; that's pretty rare to see how the fossils are found in situe and in a way more exciting than seeing a fully assembled skeleton like you would in Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT or the Natural History Museum in NYC. You can also see more, unexcavated fossils poking out of hillsides there if you keep a sharp eye.

    There are a lot of places in the Hell Creek Formation, too, that aren't in parks where you can wander around fossil hunting (provided you're on public land or got permission from the land owner). It can get hot in those places, though, and there are a lot of rattlesnakes so take a good canteen and a dog to keep the snakes off you.

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