The big sabre-toothed cats that roamed Los Angeles 12,000 years ago had bad backs and shoulders, it seems.
Meanwhile, the other apex predator that shared its southern California habitat, the dire wolf, was more likely to suffer from headaches and leg pain.
The discoveries come from an analysis of thousands of bones from skeletons of these extinct creatures, with the injuries probably sustained as a result of their dining habits.
Like other cats, the sabre-toothed Smilodon fatalis ambushed its prey and wrestled them into submission. Modern big cats suffocate their prey, by either biting down on the victim’s snout to clamp it shut or squeezing its throat to crush its trachea so it can’t breathe.
Smilodon was more heavily built, and is thought to have used its massive forelimbs to pin down large prey such as bison, horses and camels. It could then quickly kill the animal by ripping out its throat with its long curved canine teeth.
Injuries are inevitable in such battles to the death, and are known in modern cats as well as fossils. But no one had looked at enough bones to tell how often they occurred either in the past or present.
