IT HAD formidable teeth, but the sabre-toothed tiger’s bite scarcely did them justice.
Analysis of the skull of Smilodon fatalis, a heavily built cat that lived in North America until the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, reveals it could bite with only one-third of the force of a similar-sized modern lion.
A team led by Colin McHenry at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia, ran CT scans on a sabre-tooth skull and a lion skull. From these, they created 3D computer models of the skulls which they used to test the…
