Summary: <p>This week we’ve got a heaping helping of animals with big pointy teeth! Whether you spell it saber or sabre, you don’t want teeth of that description biting you.</p> <p>Smilodon is the best saber-toothed cat:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-326" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Smilodon_fatalis_Sergiodlarosa-300x186.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="186"></p> <p>Thylacosmilus’s weird chin bone:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-327" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Thylacosmilus-skull-Natural-History-Museum-London-Alexei-Kouprianov-Wikipedia-300x285.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="285"></p> <p>Thylacosmilus might have looked something like this when alive:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-328" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Thylacosmilus-300x116.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="116"></p> <p>Kolponomos might have looked something like this when alive:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-329" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/kolponomos_newportensis_head_restoration_by_romanyevseyev-d5jx42m-300x117.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="117"></p> <p>And the sabertooth fish is still alive!</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-330" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/sabertooth-fish-300x104.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="104"></p> <p>Show transcript:</p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>For this week’s episode, we’re looking at saber-toothed animals. The animal people generally think of as THE saber-tooth cat, or saber-tooth tiger, is Smilodon fatalis. Smilodon and its relatives were members of the feline family, although not very closely related to the big and little cats living today. We have a whole bunch of Smilodon fossils, many from the La Brea tar pits in California.</p> <p>Smilodon was probably descended from a saber-tooth cat called Megantereon, which lived in North America, Eurasia, and Africa. It might have still been around only half a million years ago, was definitely around as recently </p>
