A pair of pussy cats

It is a very wet day in Scotland; just the day for a couple of skulls.

Sabre-tooths are extinct, cat-like carnivores that are characterised by their large upper blade-like canine teeth. Sabre-toothed cats existed from the Eocene through to the Pleistocene Epoch (55.8 million to 11,700 years ago).

The best known species is the sabre-toothed tiger (unrelated to modern tigers) Smilodon fatalis which roamed North America and Europe from 23 to 2.6 million years ago. However, the sabre-tooth adaptation to killing arose many times over in the carnivore lineage, and there are a large number of species known from the fossil record. These are the skulls of two of them, both from what is now North America..

Hoplophoneus primaevus on the left is a very old species dating from the Oligocene Epoch, about 33 million years ago. Xenosmilus hodsonae on the right was one of the last species to appear, in the Pleistocene about 1.5 million years ago.