American Lion (Panthera atrox)

[Sully]

I've typed out a reply to this a few times but nothing quite seems to satisfy me. You make a good point on the whole frenzy of the kill, the link is there to be made given the smilodon tooth wear is similar to current lion ones. In terms of whether each cat existed in groups or not, I don't really think that it would make too much of a difference in their respective extinctions however. With depleting preferred prey I would imagine that if there were groups, they slowly dissolved out and the animals favoured a more solitary lifestyle, the pride becoming unsustainable. We can see this today in the difference of pride sizes between African lions and Asiatic ones who have lower prey density. Maybe the stress wear of a frenzy kill and the gnawing of bone stress wear due to lesser prey are similar and thus it was assumed nothing changed? Regardless drawing distinctions between expectance of extinction by a group cat and a solitary one, I think that's hard to do as ultimately in their very last days, I imagine they likely favoured a similar lifestyle, that being solitary.

On the point of the smilodon taking more risks, I tend to agree. It seemed a more specialised predator, with the machairodontinae being a lot different physically to all cats we have knowledge of. The implications of this would be going after more dangerous prey, but maybe with the depletion of the pride taking down these animals became harder? The group didn't have enough to share, but without numbers, targeting preferred prey became a bigger task and their build wasn't malleable enough to adapt to other options?

Major assumtions are involved in coming up with a theory for why these big cats died out. From the link it seems their decline came in a very short period of time. Just what triggered that is yet to be known. It's all theoretical at the moment. I agree there is a missing link tying all of this together. Though radical environmental change does seem typical of a species we're quite familiar with... Reply