The recent discovery of a sabertooth cat skull in southwest Iowa is the first evidence the prehistoric predator once inhabited the state.
The chance of finding any fossilized remains from a sabertooth cat is slim, says Matthew Hill, an associate professor of archaeology at Iowa State and expert on animal bones. The remarkably well-preserved skull found in Page County is even rarer, and its discovery offers clues about the iconic Ice Age species before its extinction roughly 12-13,000 years ago.
โThe skull is a really big deal,โ says Hill. โFinds of this animal are widely scattered and usually represented by an isolated tooth or bone. This skull from the East Nishnabotna River is in near perfect condition. Itโs exquisite.โ
Hill analyzed the specimen in collaboration with David Easterla, professor emeritus of biology at Northwest Missouri State University. Their findings appear in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
The researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine the cat died at the end of the Ice Age between 13,605 and 13,460 years ago. Hill says it may have been one of the last sabertooths to walk the planet as glaciers receded and temperatures rose.
โWe think southwest Iowa during this period was a parkland with patches of trees interspersed with grassy openings, somewhat similar to central Canada today,โ says Hill. โThe cat would have lived alongside other extinct animals like dire wolf, giant short-faced bear, long-nosed peccary, flat-headed peccary, stag-moose, muskox, and giant ground sloth, and maybe a few bison and mammoth.โ
Hill and Easterla believe the skull belonged to a subadult (2-3 year old) male when it died. Gaps between the skullโs boney plates indicate its head was still growing, and the permanent teeth donโt show much wear from cutting and chewing. To figure out its sex, they compared its skull measurements with adult male and female sabertooth skulls from the Rancho La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles.
Hill explains sabertooth were sexually dimorphic, meaning males were larger than females. Since the Iowa skull is larger than many male skulls from the tar pits, the researchers argue it belonged to a male. They estimate the Iowa cat weighed about 550 pounds at death and may have approached 650 pounds as an adult in prime physical condition. In comparison, the average adult male African lion weighs about 400 pounds.
How the sabertooth cat died is not clear. But a broken canine might offer a clue. Hill and Easterla speculate the animal was seriously injured while attacking prey, which ultimately proved fatal within days of the trauma.
Small patches of worn-down bone on top of the skull indicate it slid along a river-bottom before coming to rest and then buried for thousands of years.
โWe can learn a lot from these types of fossils. They hold clues about the ecology of the animals, and how they respond to dramatic climate change and the appearance of a new predator and competitor on the landscape, including people,โ says Hill. โIowa is a fantastic laboratory to do research on extinct Ice Age animals and the people who were just beginning to share the landscape with them.โ
Research opportunities with the sabertooth cat skull donโt end with the published analysis, the researchers say.
Hill suspects the catโs primary prey was Jeffersonโs giant ground sloth, which were common in Iowa during the Ice Age. Theyโd sit beside trees and bushes and pull in leaves and buds to eat. At 8-to-10 feet tall and over 2,200 pounds, giant ground sloths were massive. Hill believes only a large predator armed with โabsolutely lethal jaws and clawsโ and legs designed for pouncing could hunt them regularly.
To test this, Hill is teaming up with Andrew Somerville, assistant professor of archaeology at Iowa State who is an expert in dietary reconstruction using bone geochemistry. Together, theyโre developing a stable isotope mixing model with samples from the sabertooth cat, other carnivores, and herbivores (e.g., Jeffersonโs ground sloth, muskox, stag-moose.)
โYou are what you eat, and itโs locked in your bones,โ says Hill.
Stable isotopes make it possible for researchers to know what plants herbivores eat and, in turn, what herbivores carnivores eat. They can piece together local food webs and how species filled ecological niches.
โSo, maybe the sabertooth was primarily eating giant ground sloth, dire wolves, primarily moose, and short-faced bears, a little bit of everything. Andrew and I are going to figure it out,โ says Hill.
The researchers expect to publish their findings in the coming year.
Source: Iowa State University
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Our favorites this week included the truth behind the term โburnout,โ an incisive analysis of rap scapegoating, flowers for an aging icon, the beauty of noticing hidden wildlife, and an engaging look at historyโs forgotten children. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
Bench Ansfield | Jewish Currents | January 3, 2023 | 3,358 words
I might have recommended this essay based on the excellent headline alone, but in fact the substance is the star of the show. Like many millennials, I have adopted the term โburnoutโ into my vocabulary as a way of describing the feeling of working too hard, juggling too much, and feeling depleted by the grinding expectations of late-stage capitalism. After reading this piece, Iโll be endeavoring to use the word differently. As historian Bench Ansfield shows, the true origins of burnout as a concept have been obscured over time. Burnout isnโt a reference to a candle burning at both ends until thereโs nothing left, but to the shells of buildings left by a wave of arson that ravaged Black and brown neighborhoods in New York City in the โ70s. Much of the damage was caused by landlords looking for insurance payouts. โIf we excavate burnoutโs infrastructural unconscious โ its origins in the material conditions of conflagration โ we might discover a term with an unlikely potential for subversive meaning,โ Ansfield writes. โAn artifact of an incendiary history, burnout can vividly name the disposability of targeted populations under racial capitalism โ a dynamic that, over time, has ensnared ever-wider swaths of the workforce.โ If this were the premise of a college class, Iโd sign up in a heartbeat. โSD
Justin A. Davis | Scalawag | February 9, 2023 | 4,089 words
Put aside the chewy headline for a moment. Also put away whatever you know or donโt know about Young Thug, one of Atlantaโs most influential rap luminaries for a decade, and the epicenter of a sprawling and questionable criminal investigation into his YSL crew. What youโll find is a shrewd, fascinating analysis that combines a music obsessiveโs encyclopedic genre knowledge and a Southernerโs geographical intimacy, refracted through a lens of accessible (a crucial modifier!) political theory. It ably unpacks the hydra-headed beast of gentrification and economics and policing, as faced by the young Black man whoโs currently the Fulton County DAโs public enemy number one. โAs working-class and poor Black Atlantans fight against displacement and fall back on everyday survival tactics,โ Justin A. Davis writes, โtheyโre joining a decades-long struggle over who exactly the cityโs for. So is YSL.โ This sort of piece is exceedingly rare, not because of its form but because it demands an outlet that understands and nurtures its particular Venn diagram. Credit toย Scalawag, and of course to Davis, for creating something this urgent. Required reading โ not just for Thugga fans or Atlantans, but for anyone seeking to understand the world outside their own. โPR
Wright Thompson | ESPN | February 8, 2022 | 12,111 words
โNo. 16 is no longer what it once was. Joe Montana now must be something else.โ I havenโt kept up with American football in at least 20 years, but that didnโt stop me from devouring Wright Thompsonโs astonishing profile of former 49er quarterback Joe Montana. I grew up watching the Niners (Ronnie Lott 4eva) and have fond memories of attending games at Candlestick as a child. But you certainly donโt need to be a Niner fan, a football fan, or even be into sports at all to appreciate this beautifully written and revealing piece. Thompson paints a portrait of a complicated man and an aging athlete โ one of the greatest of all time โ and what itโs like to watch someone else take over that throne. โCLR
Lucy Jones | Emergence Magazine | February 2, 2023 | 5,179 words
The forest path near us is a never-ending source of delight. I love being the first to see animal tracks in the snow. I look forward to the first yellow lady slippers that appear as if by magic near the marshy section, not to mention all the leaves and flowers as they sprout, and the myriad fungi that cling to the trees. Lucy Jones shares this wonder in nature (at slime molds in particular!) inย Emergence Magazine. There she finds equal parts beauty, mystery, and wonder โย a coveted yet all-too-elusive feeling nowadays โ as she scans the forest for varieties that sheโs just now starting to notice. โMy eyes were starting to learn slime mold,โ she writes. โMy ways of seeing were altering, thanks to my new friends who were showing me what to look for. What was once invisible was quickly becoming apparent. It challenged my sense of perception. How little and how limited was my vision! How vast was the unknown world.โโKS
April Nowell | Aeon | February 13, 2023 | 4,400 words
April Nowell opens this piece with a delightful story about a Palaeolithic family taking their kids and dogs to a cave to do some mud painting, which feels like the modern-day equivalent of exhausted parents taking their offspring to McDonaldโs and handing them a coloring book. I was instantly entranced. Such stories are rare, partly because evidence of children (with their small, fragile bones) is tricky for archaeologists to locate, but also because of assumptions that children were insignificant to the narrative. Nowell explains how, with the help of new archaeological approaches, this is changing, and the children of the Ice Age are getting a voice. I am ready to listen, so bring on these tales of family excursions and novices struggling to learn the craft of tool sculpting (as Nowell explains, โeach unskilled hit would leave material traces of their futile and increasingly frustrated attempts at flake removalโ). A Palaeolithic archaeologist and professor of anthropology, Nowell is an expert in this topic, but her vivid writing and human-based approach makes her fascinating field accessible to all. โCW
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While changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on crocodilesโ gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect.
โThe American crocodile tolerates huge variations in temperature and rainfall. But about 20,000 years agoโwhen much of the worldโs water was frozen, forming the vast ice sheets of the last glacial maximumโsea levels dropped by more than 100 meters [about 328 feet],โ says Josรฉ Avila-Cervantes, a postdoctoral fellow working under the supervision of Hans Larsson, a professor of biology at the Redpath Museum of McGill University. โThis created a geographical barrier that separated the gene flow of crocodiles in Panama.โ
The researchers point out that the crocodiles are good swimmers, but they canโt travel long distances on land. As a result, the Caribbean and Pacific crocodile populations were isolated from each other, and consequently have undergone different genetic mutations.
For the study in the journal Evolution, the team compared the climate tolerance of living populations of American crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus) to the paleoclimate estimates for the region over the past 3 million yearsโthe time span of extreme climate variation during the Ice Age.
โThis is one of the first times Ice Age effects have been found in a tropical species. Itโs exciting to discover effects of the last Ice Age glaciation still resonate in the genomes of Pacific and Caribbean American crocodiles today,โ Larsson says.
โDiscovering that these animals would have easily tolerated the climate swings of the Ice Age speaks to their resilience over geological time. Only humans in recent decades of hunting and land development seem to really affect crocodiles,โ he says.
The findings offer new insight into how environmental drivers affect genetic evolution and where conservation efforts of particular crocodile populations in Panama should be focused.
Source: McGill University
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