Scientists made an archaeology breakthrough after revealing new and unprecedented insights into a long-extinct animal that used to roam the frozen tundras of Siberia.
During an expedition in 2002, a team of researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences made a groundbreaking discovery.
Buried in the permafrost was the 37,000-year-old mummified body of a baby sabre-toothed tiger.
The kitten was found frozen in a block of ice in Yakutia, and was astonishingly perfectly preserved.
The three-year-old baby cat’s head, forelimbs, torso, and paws were kept in near-pristine condition by the ice – allowing scientists to carry out detailed examinations.
Now in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, the academics have provided fascinating details about the animal.
Several notable features distinguished it from its modern-day successors, such as a lion cub.
The mummified kitten was found to be significantly more muscular and had a “very massive neck”.
It also had an unusual muzzle shape which was much wider than that of a modern lion.
Dr Alexey Lopatin and his co-authors wrote: “One of the striking features of the morphology of Homotherium, both in adults and in the studied cub, is the presence of an enlarged premaxillary bone.”
The bone sits in the front part of the upper jaw and would have allowed the baby cat to grow a row of large cone-shaped incisors.
The scientists said the baby sabre-toothed tiger most probably lived during a period called the Late Piocene.
This was a time when the Earth was covered in vast sheets of ice.
Sabre-toothed cats existed from the Eocene through the Pleistocene Epoch (56 million to 11,700 years ago).
The most widely known genus of sabre-toothed cats is Smilodon, the “sabre-toothed tiger.”
A large, short-limbed cat that lived in North and South America during the Pleistocene Epoch, it was about the size of the modern African lion.
