Welcome to You Ask Andy

Isaac McGraw, Jr., age 11, of Columbia, S,C,, for his question:

What is a saber‑tooth tiger?

The saber‑tooth tiger no longer stalks the earth. To see him in action we would have to go back in time for perhaps 100,000 years. He was, of course, a big cat, about the size of a modern tiger. However, he was a bulky, bob‑tailed fellow without the lithe grace of our tiger.

He may have been slower and less springy than our tiger, but he was just as powerful. This means he was a very powerful animal indeed. For our tiger can crush the skull of an ox with a blow of his giant paw.

The scientific name for Old Saber‑Tooth is smilodon. His terrible claws and teeth prove that smilodon was a flesh‑eating killer. Those two curved fangs from. which he gets the name saber‑tooth were nine to twelve inches long. They hung down from his upper jaw, way below his chin.

Smilodon shared the world with all sorts of other animals which have long since perished. He stalked through Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. He lived during the early Pleistocene Period when the bitter ice Ages came and went. Modern cats, we all know, love to be warm and cozy. A few wild cats live in the frozen north but most members of this furry family choose to live in tropical or semitropical climates. However, the experts tell us that because of their warm fur coats, the cats must have got their start in colder regions. This makes it easier to understand why the big saber‑tooth tiger was so common during and between the lee Ages. He felt at home in the cold weather.

During the Ice Ages, vast glaciers crept down from the pole and covered much of North America. The glaciers were two to three miles thick. They crushed the plant life and animals fled. south as they advanced. Then the climate changed. The ice melted, the glaciers retreated. Plants sprang up in the damp ground which lead been under the ice and animals moved north again to feed. on th,; grass and on each other.

The glaciers advanced end retreated several times during the long Ice Ages.

This was the climate that smilodon knew. For countless ages he and his kind moved north and south with the glaciers. Vegetation was plentiful and very much like: the plants and trees we know today. Many of the animals, however, were strange. The fossil bones found in La Brea tar pits, California, prove that some very unexpected animals lived in North America 100, 000 years ago.

There were horses and wild camels, though both had disappeared from North America long before the white man came. There were bears, huge oxen and giant sloths. There, were elephants and mammoths, wolves and wide‑winged vultures. And there were; lions much bigger than our African lions of today. These Ice age lions were bigger by far than the saber‑tooth tiger. Smilodon, then, was not the: boss of this world of 100, 000 years ago, But he was well able to defend himself and well fitted to aunt for his living

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