Elephants are the largest living animals on land, and the distribution of adults coincides with the distribution of beasts of prey at the top of the food chain such as lions and tigers, but they still have no natural enemies, and in addition, there are more juvenile elephants than adult female elephants living together, so elephants have no natural enemies from juvenile to adult. However, in ancient times, there was a cat that used to feed mainly on elephants, which was the saber-toothed tiger. So why can saber-toothed tigers hunt elephants, but lions and tigers can't? Let's talk about this together.
Can saber-toothed tigers really kill elephants?
Elephant is a collective term for all animals in the order Proboscis, and from the extant proboscis order, there are only two kinds of African elephants and Asian elephants. However, proboscis was previously a large family, but most of the proboscis orders have long been eliminated, leaving only these two animals under the elephant family. Therefore, of course, the saber-toothed tiger killed not an extant elephant, but an extinct animal of the proboscis order, the mastodon. Let's take a look at the "grudge" of the two animals.
The first is the saber-toothed tiger
Strictly speaking, the saber-toothed tiger does not refer to a single animal, but to the collective name of all members of this subfamily of the cat family saber-toothed tiger, and the saber-toothed tiger subfamily includes two families: the post-cat family and the saber-toothed tiger family, which have a total of 13 genera and about 64 different animals under these two families, all of which are saber-toothed tigers, and the common feature is that they all have long-bladed canine teeth.
The earliest saber-toothed tigers were the paraserical saber-toothed tigers of the saber-toothed tiger family, whose fossils appeared in Europe and Asia as early as the Miocene (about 15 million to 9 million years ago), and according to their size, they are close to the size of the existing jaguar.
Throughout the evolution of the saber-toothed tiger subfamily, a large number of saber-toothed tigers appeared 6 million years ago, during which time there were 8 species of cat-like members, 12 species of giant chin tiger members, 14 species of saber-toothed tiger members, 20 species of short saber-toothed tiger members, and hetero-saber-toothed tigers. It can be said that since the Pliocene, the strongest carnivores on the entire land have been saber-toothed tigers, until about 10,000 years ago. It is worth mentioning that there is one animal in the saber-toothed tiger subfamily that once posed a great threat to human ancestors, and it is the dread cat under the post-cat family.
Therefore, the saber-toothed tiger is actually a large family, they gradually occupied the main ecological niche on the land from the Mesocene, and from the Pliocene began to show a blowout situation, becoming the hegemon of the land. In terms of body size, most of the members of the saber-toothed tiger subfamily are close to those of today's big cats, except that their canine teeth are different.
Let's look at the mastodon again
The mastodon is an early proboscis, its ancestors are archaeopteryxes living about 55 million years ago, Archaeopteryx is considered to be the ancestor of the proboscis order, it is an amphibian mammal, there is no obvious proboscis and tusks, similar to the habits and morphology of hippopotamus, weighing only about 200 kg, far less than the modern proboscis.
Over the course of about 25 million years of evolution, Archaeopteryx evolved a diverse range of proboscis members, including the ancient mastodon, the direct ancestor of the mastodon. Judging from the fossils of ancient mastodons, they are twice the size of Archaeopteryx, and the most important thing is that they already have obvious long noses and tusks. (The picture below is the Archaeopteryx)
Paleo-mastodons continued to evolve, and by the Miocene there were two distinct branches, one from the intarsia to the modern elephants, the true elephants, and the other evolved into the mastodondae family about 5.5 million years ago. The family Mastodondae is divided into two branches according to different morphologies, one is the long-jawed mastodon and the other is the short-jawed mastodon (also known as the American short-jawed elephant, the American mastodon).
The biggest difference between the two branches is that the former has a longer tusk under the snout and the tusks grow downwards, while the short-jawed elephant is closer to the current elephant, both with a long nose and curved upward tusks.
The mastodondae survived from its appearance until its appearance about 5.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago. (Picture 1 below is a long-jawed mastodon, and the bottom figure 2 is a short-jawed elephant)
The two major types of mastodons, they are similar in size to today's elephants, but their shoulder height is lower than that of today's elephants, but their length is longer than that of existing elephants, so their average adult male weight is also about 4.5 tons. Although they were similar in size to today's elephants, scientists believe that the extinction of mastodons, which were distributed in Europe, Asia, and the Americas at that time, was one of the factors that contributed to the extinction of the saber-toothed tiger subfamily. This is because at that time, the animals under the saber-toothed tiger subfamily mainly fed on the prey of elephants, and the mastodons and saber-toothed tigers at that time happened to be animals with the same domain distribution.
Why is it that a saber-toothed tiger that is not much different from the size of a lion tiger can kill a mastodon that is close to the size of an elephant?
At present, lions and African elephants, Bengal tigers and Asian elephants are all co-species animals, but elephants are rarely seen in the diets of the two, and they are usually well water without water. However, why is it that a saber-toothed tiger of the same size as a lion tiger can feed on a mastodon? The reason is simple, the problem is in the saber teeth.
The biggest feature of members of the saber-toothed tiger subfamily is that it has long-bladed upper canine teeth, even ordinary saber-toothed tigers have 10 cm upper canine teeth, and the length of upper canine teeth like the bladed tiger can even reach nearly 20 cm. The length of the canine teeth of the current large individual lion tiger, such as the Siberian tiger, is only about 5 centimeters.
The saber-toothed tiger's longer upper canine teeth made its jaw somewhat degenerate, resulting in a smaller bite force than that of today's lions and tigers, so biologists deduced that their bite force was only half that of today's lions and tigers. But than lethality, the bite force is not the most critical factor, because like humans only have tens of kilograms of bite force, but with the non-sharp teeth can also bite the skin of the animal, so the bite force of the saber-toothed tiger is enough for it to easily bite the skin of the prey, and the rest is handed over to the canine teeth of more than 10 centimeters, the longer the length of the canine teeth, the greater the damage to the prey.
Saber-toothed tigers jumped on the back of the mastodon through the jumping force, and then stabbed it with their own pointed long canine teeth, which were two blood holes, after biting, jumping down, jumping up again, and taking another bite, slowly these deep wounds will inevitably bleed more and more, and finally even if they are as big as the mastodon, they can only fall to the ground.
Lions and tigers are different, their canine tooth length for elephants can not cause fatal injuries, after all, the elephant's skin armor fat is 2-3 cm thick, that is to say, the lion tiger's canine teeth only 1-2 cm can enter the elephant's body, so it is obviously impossible to cause fatal injuries to the elephant. Coupled with the fact that the risk of hunting elephants is too high, the lion and tiger have given up this large animal.
summary
Saber-toothed tigers are the animals with the longest average canine teeth in the history of cat evolution, and it is precisely because of the long canine teeth that saber-toothed tigers cannot hunt small and medium-sized prey (teeth are inserted into the bones, easy to break canine teeth), and can only feed on large and slow-moving animals, and it is precisely because of narrow feeding that the saber-toothed tiger has led to the extinction.
Today's big cats, with moderate teeth length, allow them to hunt both small prey and large prey (except for animals with thick skin like elephants), from this point of view, today's big cats are much more capable of fighting natural changes than saber-toothed tigers.
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