The fearsome - looking saber - toothed cat-o'-nine-tails prowled across the grasslands of Europe and America in the surprisingly late yesteryear . With many coinage bed from the fossil record , the fanged creatures were diverse and wide-ranging , and now researchers have been peeking into this complicated evolutionary past by reconstructingsections of their ancient DNA .
An outside squad led by Potsdam University , Germany , has been comparing two unlike species of saber - toothed cat . The first belonged to the group eff asHomotherium , which lived through much of Europe and North America , South America and even Africa over a period of 4 million years . The second was a member of the much more famousSmilodongenus of the Americas , which stalked the Pleistocene grassland until around 10,000 years ago when they go extinct .
From four fossils , the investigator have been able-bodied to decode the mitochondrial deoxyribonucleic acid for two species of the toothy cat , allowing them to begin construct the felines ' evolutionary past . Their results , publish inCell Press , have show , pretty surprisingly , that the puppet have a deep evolutionary history , with the lineage that gave cost increase to the sabered creature splitting off from the rest of the moggies some 20 million year ago .
But what is more surprising was the discovery that relatively quickly after this break – geologically speaking at least – the two genus go their own separate way of life . The results show that the group that containsSmilodonand that which housesHomotheriumdiverged at least 18 million years ago , have in mind that even though the two groups of cavalry sword - toothed cat look physically very similar , they are more distantly related than the modern tiger is to the domestic computed axial tomography .
include among the fossils that the squad were capable to reconstruct the mitochondrial genome from was that of aHomotheriumcat dredge up from the North Sea . This patch of body of water has been rich picking for fossil from the Pleistocene , as the shallow sea was until very late open tundra criss - crossed with river . Fishermen frequently bring up the remains of mammoths , woolly rhino , and even man .
But theHomotheriumskull was more important than most . Until its discovery , dating to around 28,000 years erstwhile , most expert believed that the cats went extinct in Europe hundreds of thousands of year earlier .
“ This find was so particular becauseHomotheriumis generally trust to have gone out in Europe around 300,000 years ago , so [ this specimen is ] over 200,000 long time vernal than the next - to - young Homotherium find in Europe,”explainedJohanna Paijmans , who carried out the inquiry .
This means that modern humans and Neanderthals were almost certainly be side - by - side with them , while in the Americas , humans there were also competing withSmilodon .
