A recent visit to a fossil collection in a South African quarry discovered two new species of sabertooth cats. Africa's sabertooth collection now includes 5.2 million-year-old feline fossils. Among the feline fossils, the researchers uncovered two cat species, one of which had never been found in South Africa.
The Langebaanweg 'E' Quarry, an open-cast mine on South Africa's west coast, has produced vertebrate fossils since 1965, according to Gismodo. Experts believe that the fossils were formed around 5 million years ago during the transition of the Miocene-Pliocene.
After examining the cats' skulls, jaws, teeth, and other data, Johannes Willbold of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany's research team created a sabertooth family tree. Their study, published in iScience, sheds important light on the environment of the distant past and the development of these unique creatures.
Around 6-7 million years ago, a diverse variety of long-toothed predators known as sabertooth cats inhabited Africa when hominins, including modern humans, started their development, per Phys.org.
The study's co-author and Complutense University paleontologist Alberto Valenciano said that the results imply that Langebaanweg's habitat was changing.
The existence of bigger and quicker sabertooth cats suggests that throughout the late Miocene and Pliocene epochs, the area's habitat was probably changing from a wooded environment to a grassland or dry desert-like ecosystem. The development of early hominins toward bipedalism may have been significantly influenced by this change.
