Emerging from the Shadow of Smilodon
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BOOK REVIEW
Emerging from the Shadow of Smilodon The Other Saber-Tooths: Scimitar-Toothed Cats of the Western Hemisphere. Edited by V. L. Naples, L. D. Martin, and J. P. Babiarz. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011. 236 pp., $110 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-9664-9 John D. Orcutt
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Machairodontines, more popularly known as saber-toothed cats, are perhaps the most iconic of extinct mammals, due in no small part to the extensive research that has been carried out on Smilodon, known from the Pleistocene of the Americas. Machairodontines are, however, considerably more diverse than is often realized, spreading to and dominating the carnivore fauna on nearly every continent during the Neogene. Their diversity is often organized into two groups: the dirk-toothed cats, including Smilodon and its relatives the smilodontins, and the scimitar-toothed cats or homotheriins, characterized by shorter but more robust canines. Historically, the former group has been more extensively studied, largely because of the hundreds of specimens of S. fatalis that have been recovered from the tar seeps of Rancho La Brea. The study of scimitar-toothed cats, particularly in North America, has long languished in the shadow of Smilodon. As its title suggests, The Other Saber-tooths focuses on homotheriins and does much to even out this imbalance. Even if The Other Saber-tooths consisted only of its middle chapters, it would still be a valuable contribution to the study of fossil carnivorans. Higher-level analyses in paleontology, be they ecological, phylogenetic, or functional, rely on the existence of a robust morphological and taxonomic framework for the organism in question. Despite the importance of saber-toothed predators in North America’s Cenozoic faunas, and with the exception of the body of literature on Homotherium serum from Friesenhahn Cave, Texas, such a framework did not exist for scimitartoothed cats in North America. The Other Saber-tooths rectifies this omission by including three chapters on the osteology and myology of Xenosmilus hodsonae and J. D. Orcutt (*) University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97470, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Homotherium ischyrus, the other two species of Pleistocene homotheriins in North America, and a fourth establishing a taxonomy for these taxa, along with H. serum. These chapters, with their comprehensive tables of measurements, detailed descriptions, and high-quality illustrations, have effectively doubled the number of Pleistocene machairodontines for which a rigorous framework exists. In the case of Xenosmilus, such descriptive work is doubly valuable as the type specimen of X. hodsonae is housed in a private collection and, therefore, may not be readily available for study. Homotherium ischyrus, while it has been known for a longer period of time, has, like many fossil felids, been the subject of much taxonomic confusion, and this clear delineation of how it differs from other species of Homotherium will do much to simplify future studies
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