Researchers analyzed a mummified specimen collected from permafrost in Siberia in 2020 and identified it as a saber-toothed cat kitten that died at least 35,000 years ago.
A team of researchers excavated a newborn saber-toothed cat mummy that perished tens of thousands of years ago from the permafrost in Siberia. The young cat still has intact whiskers and claws. New analysis of the head and upper body of the specimen indicates it was only 3 weeks old at the time of death in what is now the Sakha Republic in northeastern Russia, also known as Yakutia. Scientists found the pelvis, femur, and tibia encased in the same block of ice as the mummy. The circumstances leading to its death have not yet been clearly determined.
Mummy of the saber-toothed cat kitten. (Photo: Scientific Reports).
Intact saber-toothed cat specimens are extremely rare. The mummy belongs to the extinct species Homotherium latidens, according to research published on November 14 in the journal Scientific Reports. Saber-toothed cats roamed the world during the Late Pleistocene (2.6 – 5.3 million years ago) and the early Holocene (11,700 – 2.6 million years ago), but evidence suggests they were less widely distributed by the end of the Holocene (the last Ice Age).
“For a long time, the presence of H. latidens on the Eurasian continent has been noted in the Middle Holocene (126,000 – 770,000 years ago). The discovery of the H. latidens mummy in Yakutia significantly expands our understanding of their distribution and confirms their existence at the end of the Holocene in Asia,” the research team from the Borissiak Paleontological Institute stated.
The frozen small specimen indicates that H. latidens was well adapted to conditions during the Ice Age. Researchers compared it with a 3-week-old modern lion (Panthera leo) and found that the saber-toothed cat had wider feet and lacked the shock-absorbing pads at the ankle joints seen in today’s big cats. These adaptations allowed the saber-toothed cat to navigate easily in snow, while its thick, soft fur protected it from extreme cold temperatures.
Comparison with lions revealed that the saber-toothed cat had a large mouth, small ears, long forelimbs, dark-colored fur, and a significantly thicker neck. Scientists have known that this species had a low body and long limbs from adult H. latidens skeletons, but the new study shows such characteristics were present even at 3 weeks old.
Carbon dating results of the mummy’s fur indicate that the cat was buried in the permafrost for at least 35,000 – 37,000 years. The specimen was collected from the banks of the Badyarikha River in Yakutia in 2020, allowing researchers to describe the physical characteristics of H. latidens for the first time, including fur texture, snout shape, and muscle mass distribution. Notably, the mummy preserved sharp claws and whiskers, but no longer had eyelashes.
