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Post by OldGreenGrolar on Nov 16, 2023 4:08:59 GMT -5
Smilodon populator, probably the biggest cat ever, vs the modern polar bear. First of all, the saber-toothed cat would be desperately hungry and out of options to ambush a bear bigger than himself. Smilodon will have multiple problems here. In the virgin-white terrain, the big cat will not be able to complete an attempted ambush. This fight will be face-to-face - something no cat relishes. Smilodon kills with a single slicing bite. severing the juggler. But, to accomplish this, he must first throw the polar bear down and subdue him - meaning to hold him steady so as there is very little struggling. The big cat cannot use those long knife-like canines on a heavy struggling animal, else he will break one or possibly both of his prized weaponry. During the fight, those long wicked-looking teeth are useless. Meanwhile, the huge bear is fighting with teeth and claws. In just a short few minutes, the bear will have crushed the mighty saber-toothed cat. _____________________________ *There is a singular case of two Smilodon fossil remains discovered, showing that one Smilodon (probably) killed the other with a bite to the skull. There has been no other animal skulls found, previous or after, of any species, with Smilodon teeth wounds to the skull. This is (imo) evidence that (if) this one Smilodon was killed by a skull-bite from a rival male, it was a fluke. The big cat probably bit into the other's skull in pure desperation. picture by theundertaker45 Just pointing out something: the Arctic is not completely Virgin white. Older polar bears are yellowish white, dry ice is icy blue, and the seas are green. Arctic foxes are white or bluish white (winter coat), female snowy owls have brown spots etc.
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Post by brobear on Nov 16, 2023 8:28:02 GMT -5
Smilodon populator, probably the biggest cat ever, vs the modern polar bear. First of all, the saber-toothed cat would be desperately hungry and out of options to ambush a bear bigger than himself. Smilodon will have multiple problems here. In the virgin-white terrain, the big cat will not be able to complete an attempted ambush. This fight will be face-to-face - something no cat relishes. Smilodon kills with a single slicing bite. severing the juggler. But, to accomplish this, he must first throw the polar bear down and subdue him - meaning to hold him steady so as there is very little struggling. The big cat cannot use those long knife-like canines on a heavy struggling animal, else he will break one or possibly both of his prized weaponry. During the fight, those long wicked-looking teeth are useless. Meanwhile, the huge bear is fighting with teeth and claws. In just a short few minutes, the bear will have crushed the mighty saber-toothed cat. _____________________________ *There is a singular case of two Smilodon fossil remains discovered, showing that one Smilodon (probably) killed the other with a bite to the skull. There has been no other animal skulls found, previous or after, of any species, with Smilodon teeth wounds to the skull. This is (imo) evidence that (if) this one Smilodon was killed by a skull-bite from a rival male, it was a fluke. The big cat probably bit into the other's skull in pure desperation. picture by theundertaker45 Just pointing out something: the Arctic is not completely Virgin white. Older polar bears are yellowish white, dry ice is icy blue, and the seas are green. Arctic foxes are white or bluish white (winter coat), female snowy owls have brown spots etc. The point I was making is not about how white the arctic is, but the fact that there are no trees, boulders, bushes, or any other cover to provide the big cat a good ambush opportunity.
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Post by brobear on Jun 13, 2024 6:01:05 GMT -5
The double-fanged adolescence of saber-toothed cats Evidence suggests saber-toothed cats held onto their baby teeth to stabilize their sabers Date: April 29, 2024 www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240429223435.htm "According to beam theory, when you bend a blade-like structure laterally sideways in the direction of their narrower dimension, they are quite a lot weaker compared to the main direction of strength," Tseng said. "Prior interpretations of how saber tooths may have hunted use this as a constraint. No matter how they use their teeth, they could not have bent them a lot in a lateral direction."
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Post by brobear on Jul 22, 2024 13:51:56 GMT -5
Our biggest living bears are more than a match for the biggest cats ever. If we were to pull out a few extinct bears, the bear's size and strength advantage would be outrageous.
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Post by brobear on Jul 24, 2024 0:28:52 GMT -5
A big cat fan recently said about this face-off.........
Overall, the Smilodon Populator is much more powerful, is a better grappler, is a much better killer due to having more experience hunting and killing large and formidable prey, it has more experience in combat, carries less body fat, and is more heavily muscled.
The Kodiak bear has a larger skull and a stronger bite force, more stamina and is more stable due to the plantigrade stance.
In a serious confrontation with both animals willing to seriously injure or kill the other, the S. Populator should take the win here, as it has better assets to win in a fight. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Smilodon fatalis had no sexual dimorphism which implicates that they did not have male vs male fights over breeding privileges. Therefore, the Kodiak bear would have more face-to-face fighting experience. We have all learned that bears actually have greater grappling ability than do the cats. We must also remember that Smilodon will not use those awesome canines of his during the heat of battle for fear of them breaking. And.... as for Smilodon being the stronger of the two, these are the words on tigerluver - a biologist: Smilodon populator - A new fossil and questions about bone robusticity to cursoriality, among other issues
Browsing through some older document, I found one of great insight to Smilodon fatalis and S. populator morphology, Relationships between North and South American Smilodon by Björn Kurtén and Lars Werdelin. The differences between the forms were analyzed by this work, and you can read up on it in the attachment.
Postcranial anatomy interests me the most. For one, I found a record size humerus of 410 mm. Isometrically comparing to the bear humerus of 400.5 mm, this specimen would be about 470 kg (a post on p. 1 explains why bears may be better isometric basis for this species). This humerus puts S. populator back at the top of felid weights. But there's a caveat.
The same document found that "the forelimb of S. populator is somewhat longer, relative to the hindlimb, than in S. fatalis. Such a lengthening of the forelimb is a characteristic of the open plains."
An example of this observation is the fact that lion has a proportionally longer humerus and ulna compared to the hindlimb bones, being the only big cat living almost exclusively in the open plains. This morphological characteristic results in overestimation of mass from all bone measurements when comparing to a more average proportional individual. Bone length overestimates because the bone is disproportionately long, and width dimensions overestimate because the width is more for accommodating running stress than muscle in such cases.
The brown bear has much shorter frontlimbs than hindlimbs are compared to S. populator, and a bit shorter proportions compared to S. fatalis. In this form, S. fatalis is more robust and bear-like than S. populator, but neither were probably as muscular as a bear, but rather some of the bone width was more for running stress similarly to how lions bones have widened so greatly as compared to other cats.
With that, the S. populator estimation using the brown bear as the base is probably an overestimate, or faulty at the least. S. fatalis reconstructions from a brown bear may be a bit less of an overestimate. Smilodon would lack the posterior weight the bear would in the this areas due to the FL/HL discrepancy, and thus the two species are not analogous, at least for humerus calculations. It is very possible the opposite effects of mass estimation would occur if a brown bear femur is being compared to the proportionately shorter Smilodon femur.
Smilodon's femur is proportionately much larger than its tibia compared to all pantherines by a long ways. Its humerus is also proportionately larger than its ulna, a ratio only matched by the very robust leopard and jaguar. The longer proximal bones is indicative of the fact that Smilodon is indeed much more heavily built than the lion and the tiger, and somewhat more heavyset than the leopard and jaguar.
From this, maybe the best route of Smilodon reconstruction would be one width dimensions and/or the length dimension of the bone, either allometrically or isometrically compared to only jaguars and leopards. The type of bone being used would also have to be taken into account to predict the accuracy of the estimation. Forelimb estimates may be overestimates somewhat, and vice versa for hindlimb estimates.
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Post by brobear on Jul 30, 2024 5:17:25 GMT -5
According to most reliable sources Smilodon populator reached an average weight of ~660lbs (300kg) based on the fossils being found so far. In my opinion the only extant bear populations/subspecies who could confidently stand up against it would be an Alaskan coastal grizzly/Kodiak bear, Kamchatkan brown bear or a polar bear (taking their average weights into account). What are your thoughts on this? We will conduct this topic with the average size of Smilodon populator and each bear species.
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