Enter, on Little Cat’s Feet

The kitten looks like it’s asleep. The dark brown fur is thick and soft. The eyes are closed. The snout is a bit blunt, the head stocky, the ears slightly differently placed, the neck unusually thick. Lots of whiskers. Pet it, stroke it, and surely it will awake. Except:

It’s been dead for roughly 35,000 years. Not your average cat, this. Not a fossil. Nothing turned to stone, no bones mineralized. The skin, hair, and flesh are intact even if the entire body is not present. One extended leg, longer than you might expect, terminates in a paw with squarish instead of oval pads. This is a Homotherium cub, a three-week old representative of one of the last species of saber-toothed cats.

Paleontology has been an interest of mine all my life. As a small child I remember the excitement of visiting the American Museum of Natural History in New York and seeing there the (incorrectly but still impressive) mounted skeletons of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. Later, when I lived in Los Angeles and had my own car, I used to visit the La Brea Tar Pits frequently and, once it was built, haunt the George Page museum of Ice Age fossils. Among the dire wolves and American camels and other relics of the Pleistocene were the skeletons of sabertooths, awesome even only as bones. Much later I recall the astonishment of reading about the mummified remains of mammoths and wooly rhinos melting out of the permafrost in Siberia and Alaska.

During one visit to the Tucson Gem and Mineral show, some merchants from Russia had a table featuring recovered mammoth ivory (one of the few kinds of legal ivory). The also had, in small plastic bags, tufts of preserved mammoth hair ranging in hue from brown to blonde. Naturally, I bought some. It’s tough and wiry, like horsehair. When first shown the strands, none of my visitors can identify it. Hardly surprising. There are no wooly mammoths left. Only their bones, and the occasional mummified remains.

But till recently no mummy of a felida had been found. Now, discovered quite recently, we have the extraordinarily well-preserved remains of a saber-toothed cat cub. A find replete with endless interesting details, which I do not have the time to go into here (for them that is curious, here is the full scientific report, from Nature). Of particular interest to me was the color of the fur, which is much darker than is usually portrayed in paintings of sabertooths by paleoartists. Also the already developing thickness of the neck, much more massive than that of an African lion cub of the same tender age. A neck where in adulthood one would expect enormous muscles to develop capable of driving the saber teeth of a mature Homotherium deep into prey.

One day I’m sure a whole frozen adult will be recovered. Then we will get to see those massive incisors in situ, instead of just attached to jaw bones as they are in contemporary museum specimens.

When I first heard about the discovery, it was almost too much for a dedicated fan of paleontology to believe. Just say the words “saber-toothed tiger” (although it is no tiger any more than is the Tasmanian tiger) and all manner of ferocious images fill the mind. A throwback, I think, to when our distant ancestors had to battle such creatures. When I saw the first pictures of the find, I was blown away. I was also — something else. Something — unexpected.

I was sad.

As a cat lover I did not expect myself to tear up at the sight of a 35,000-years dead relic of the Pleistocene. Yet I did, because after all — it’s a kitten. Okay, a cub, but still. There is not a cuter creature in the animal kingdom than a squeaky-voiced lion cub. It was impossible for me not to envision this individual trotting along over the tundra beside its siblings, its baby teeth giving no hint of the scimitar-like weapons yet to emerge from its upper jaw, all the while squeaking adorably as it followed its muscular mother. Gazing at it during its long sleep, I wasn’t fearful of it.

I wanted to cuddle it.