Until about 10,000 years ago, the saber-tooth cat Smilodon fatalis was a fearsome predator in what is now the American West. More than 3,000 fossilized cats have been pulled from the acrid ooze of the La Brea tar pits in California, and researchers studying them have long pictured Smilodon as a lion-like hunter, chasing bison and horses out on open grasslands.

But now, analyses of hundreds of teeth from La Brea are painting a vastly different picture of this prehistoric terror, which could weigh up to 600 pounds and sported seven-inch-long canine teeth.

“The iconic images you see of saber-tooth cats taking down bison, that’s actually not supported at all,” says study leader Larisa DeSantis, a paleontologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The research, published today in the journal Current Biology, provides evidence that Smilodon may instead have been a forest dweller that primarily feasted on leaf-browsing creatures.

“[They] were more likely to be taking things like tapirs and deer, as opposed to horses and bison,” DeSantis says.

Her team’s comprehensive study also helps to explain why smaller predators such as coyotes and grey wolves were able to survive to the modern day, while larger carnivores such as saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, and American lions all went extinct 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. (Also find out about a type of saber-tooth cat that may have encountered the first humans migrating into Europe.)

The key, her team suggests, was dietary flexibility following the disappearance of many of North America’s large prehistoric herbivores, such as giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and camels. For instance, previous work found that coyotes got 20 percent smaller after the herbivore extinction event, and the new look at their teeth shows that they also adjusted their lifestyles to adapt to their new reality.

“When the large predators and prey go extinct, not only do they shrink, but they fundamentally change their diet and start scavenging to become the opportunists we know today,” DeSantis says.

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