Evolution of the sabertooth mandible: A deadly ecomorphological specialization

• Saber-toothed cats were armed with formidable weapons. They evolved a number of highly derived morphological features, most notably a pair of extremely long upper canines, which makes them unique within the felid family. Although the sabertooth character evolved several times among carnivorous mammals, sabertooth clades mostly had disjunctive occurrences both in space and time, and no sabertooth is alive today. We studied the rates of phenotypic and taxonomic diversification in the mandible of sabertooths, as compared to the rates calculated for both extinct and extant conical toothed cats. We found that the mandible's shape and physical properties in sabertooth clades evolved at distinctly higher rates than the rest of the felid tree. In addition, sabertooths had similar speciation rate to conical toothed cats, but statistically higher extinction rate. The wealth of morphological specializations required to be a sabertooth, and their tendency to focus on large-sized species as prey, was likely responsible for such high extinction rate, and for the peculiar, disjunctive patterns of sabertooth Glade occurrence in the fossil record.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Geologi (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Geology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Machairodontinae

Felidae

Speciation rate

Extinction rate

Phenotypic evolutionary rate

RRphylo

leopard neofelis-nebulosa

extinction risk

fossil record

phylogenetic

signal

cranial morphology

copes rule

r package

carnivora

speciation

diversity

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)