Have you ever wondered why some animals are still around, why they looked extinction in the face and laugh? Well, it has a lot to with eating habits, and the American cougar is prime example of this trait.'
Apparently, the cougar could have been extinct 12,000 years ago, but because it is not picky about what it eats, the creature managed to stay alive throughout the ages. Unfortunately, the Saber Tooth did not have a similar fate because this big cat was a meticulous eater.
"Before the Late Pleistocene extinction, six species of large cats roamed the plains and forests of North America. Only two - the cougar and jaguar - survived. The goal of our study was to examine the possibility that dietary factors can explain the cougar's survival," said Larisa R.G. DeSantis, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University.
Back in the late Pleistocene period, several large animals went extinct, mainly due to human hunting, disease and or climate change.
To find out how cougars survived, researchers used a technique called dental microwear texture analysis. It basically tests the eating habits of cougars by analyzing the wear and tear of the animal's teeth. If it is similar to the wear and tear of hyenas, an animal that will eat everything from the meat to the very bone of a captured prey, then it is possible survival rate would be high in the wild.
If the teeth is similar to that of a cheetah, then chances are this animal could one day face mass extinction. Cheetahs are fussy eaters, and would likely only eat the flesh of an animal, but nothing more.
Apparently, some cougars show wear and tear similar to that of fussy eaters, while others show the same wear and tear similarly to modern hyenas.
The expert explained that the Pleistocene cougars had generalized dietary behavior and most likely finish their catch unlike the larger cats that ended up extinct. This is consistent with the dietary behavior and dental wear patterns of modern cougars, which are opportunistic predators and scavengers of abandoned carrion and fully consume the carcasses of small and medium-sized prey, a "variable dietary behavior that may have actually been a key to their survival."
Researchers did their tests on 50 living and fossilized cougars.
