Thylacosmilus

Thylacosmilus
	Thylacosmilus , left in the background Glyptodon
Temporal occurrence
	Miocene to Pliocene
	7 to 2.6 million years
Locations
	South America : Argentina ; ( Province of Catamarca );
Systematics
	Synapsids (Synapsida)
	Mammals (mammalia)
	Metatheria
	Sparassodonta
	Thylacosmilidae
	Thylacosmilus
Scientific name
	Thylacosmilus
	Riggs , 1933

reconstruction

Thylacosmilus is an extinct marsupial from the order Sparassodonta . He lived in the Pliocene in South America and is the best known member of the Thylocosmilidae family. The extinct family of Thylacosmilidae was common in South America from the Miocene to the Pliocene. Their skulls were very similar to those of the placental saber-toothed cats , but as marsupials they were only very distantly related to them.

Thylacosmilus was around 1.2 meters long and with a reconstructed weight of 106 kg, about the size of a modern jaguar .

Like the saber-toothed cats, it had a pair of long canine teeth in its upper jaw that protruded far beyond the line of the mouth. Characteristic were the large tooth sheaths in the lower jaw, which we also find in Nimravids and saber-tooth cats and which obviously had the task of protecting the teeth when their mouths were closed. In contrast to the saber-toothed cats, the Thylacosmilus lacked the incisors and the retractable claws. Thylacosmilus' prey probably included large, slow mammals.

Thylacosmilus atrox skull, American Museum of Natural History.
An artistic interpretation of Thylacosmilus .

Individual evidence

↑ Stephen Wroe, Colin McHenr and Jeffrey Thomason: Bite club: comparative bite force in big biting mammals and the prediction of predatory behavior in fossil taxa. Proceeding of the Royal Society B, 2005, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1098 / rspb.2004.2986 .

Web links

Commons : Thylacosmilus - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

More information about Thylacosmilus

literature

Douglas Palmer: Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Animals. An illustrated encyclopedia. Könemann, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-8290-6113-7 .
Alan Turner: The big cats and their fossil relatives. Columbia University Press, New York NY 1997, ISBN 0-231-10229-1 .

[1] Stephen Wroe, Colin McHenr and Jeffrey Thomason: Bite club: comparative bite force in big biting mammals and the prediction of predatory behavior in fossil taxa. Proceeding of the Royal Society B, 2005, pp. 1-7, doi: 10.1098 / rspb.2004.2986 .