Mississippians discover 10,000-year-old saber-toothed tiger fossils

Unearthing the fossilized remains of an apex predator doesn’t happen every day.

Unless your name is Eddie Templeton, who recently discovered the crystallized phalanx of a saber-tooth tiger in a riverbed in Yazoo County, Mississippi, according to the USA TODAY Network’s Clarion Ledger.

“I knew it was a mineralized bone. I knew it was from the Pleistocene (ice age), but I didn’t know what it was from,” Templeton said. “It wasn’t particularly large or impressive, but it was complete. .

According to the Ledger, saber-toothed cats, or saber-toothed cats, were a large cat that weighed between 350 and 620 pounds, making the extinct creature larger than modern African lions.

The pearly whites on this creature are sharp and have a scalpel-like texture, which is a description of the elongated upper canine teeth. Its tail, on the other hand, is more like a bobcat’s.

Here’s what we know.

Experts say saber-toothed tiger bones are rare find

The bone may not look impressive, but finding one sure is.

Mississippi currently has fewer than six saber-tooth cat fossils, according to paleontologist George Phillips of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Sciences.

Carnivores are always rare. Predators are always outnumbered by their prey, Phillips said.

Other cats roam the area alongside the saber-toothed cat, including cougars, jaguars, panthers, lynxes, ocelots and river cats. The venomous saber-toothed cat may not have been the only cat to roam the area during the last Ice Age, but it certainly stands out. The bite of this fearsome predator is considered special.

“They’re a little bigger than a banana,” Phillips said of the saber-toothed cat’s canines. “They’re about 10.5 inches long. A little more than half of them are embedded in the skull. We’re looking at about 5 inches beyond the gum line. It has well-developed shoulder, neck and jaw musculature. Along with the sabers, it helps it specialize of feeding.

How the teeth were used is unclear, but Philippe believes they were used to penetrate deeply into soft tissue, such as the underbelly of a giant ground sloth or a young mastodon. A cat can inflict fatal wounds with just one bite, but there is less danger of tooth damage and the cat will stand back and wait for the animal to yield.

“I thought it had to be a hit,” Phillips said.

Others believe the dagger-like teeth were used to grab prey by the neck.

Sabre-toothed cats were once apex predators, evidence can be seen in remains

The saber-toothed tiger’s reign as the apex predator eventually came to an end, either due to the arrival of humans, climate change, or a combination of these factors.

All that’s left of this giant animal and others like it are fossil remains.

Templeton, who considers himself an amateur archaeologist, hopes he can find another bone in the same area where he found the fossil. He hopes to get another piece of flesh from one of the giant cats.

“It makes me optimistic that I might find a tooth,” Templeton said. “It will be an amazing moment.”

This article originally appeared in USA Today: ‘Wow’: Mississippians discover 10,000-year-old saber-toothed tiger fossil