How Cougars Survived a Mass Extinction While the Saber-Tooth Cat Perished

Cougars have been around for a long while. In fact, they managed to survive the mass extinction that took place about 12,000 years ago while the saber-tooth cat and American lion went extinct. Now, scientists have discovered how cougars managed to endure while their cousins perished.

"Before the Late Pleistocene extinction six species of large cats roamed the plains and forests of North America. Only two-the cougar and jaguar-survived," said Ryan Haupt, one of the researchers, in a news release. "The goal of our study was to examine the possibility that dietary factors can explain the cougar's survival."

So how did they manage to look at the diets of these ancient cats? The researchers looked at their teeth. They employed a new technique called dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) in order to produce a three-dimensional image of the cats' teeth. This allowed them to see what sort of meals the large cats might have had.

Analyzing modern carnivores has shown that the meals an animal consumes during the last few weeks of its life leave telltale marks. For example, red meat results in small parallel scratches on the teeth. Chomping on bones, in contrast, adds larger, deeper pits. This allowed the researchers to take a look at the teeth of saber-tooth cats and American lions to better understand what they might have eaten during their last days.

So what did they find? Previous studies found that the dental wear patterns of extinct American lions closely resembled those of modern cheetahs, which are extremely finicky eaters; they only consume tender meat and rarely gnaw on bones. In contrast, saber-tooth cats were similar to African lions and chewed on both flesh and bone.

In the end, the scientists found that cougars showed the most diversity in their tooth patterns. While some individuals showed patterns similar to finicky eaters, other individuals had wear patterns that were close to modern hyenas, which consume almost the entire body of their prey.

"This suggests that Pleistocene cougars had a 'more generalized' dietary behavior," said Larisa DeSantis, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Specifically, they likely killed and often fully consumed their prey, more so than the large cats that went extinct."

 The findings are published in the journal Biology Letters.