The big sabre-toothed cats that roamed Los Angeles 12,000 years ago had bad backs and shoulders, it seems.
Meanwhile, the other apex predator that shared its southern California habitat, the dire wolf, was more likely to suffer from headaches and leg pain.
The discoveries come from an analysis of thousands of bones from skeletons of these extinct creatures, with the injuries probably sustained as a result of their dining habits.
Like other cats, the sabre-toothed Smilodon fatalis ambushed its prey and wrestled them into submission. Modern big cats suffocate their prey, by either biting down on the victim’s snout to clamp it shut or squeezing its throat to crush its trachea so it can’t breathe.
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The hunt for British Big Cats attracts far more newspaper column-inches than any other cryptozoological subject. There are so many of them now that we feel that they should be archived by us in some way, so we should have a go at publishing a regular round-up of the stories as they come in. Curated by Carl Marshall and Olivia McCarthy
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