Jackson School of Geosciences doctoral student John Moretti holds a skull of the saber-toothed catthat is part of the Jackson School’s Vertebrate Paleontology Collections. Credit: Jackson School of Geosciences, expanding our understanding of this prehistoric cat’s geographic range and its ecological impact.
The fossil, appearing as a lumpy, rounded rock with a couple of exposed, worn teeth, had been shaped by its time on the Gulf of Mexico’s seabed before washing ashore. X-ray analysis at the Jackson School’s University of Texas Computed Tomography Lab exposed an additional, hidden canine tooth within the jawbone, unerupted and preserved.that is part of the Jackson School of Geosciences’ Vertebrate Paleontology Collections.
Their fossils have been found in several areas of Texas, but this fossil shows for the first time that the big cat roamed the now-submerged continental shelf that connects Texas and Florida. Scientists hypothesize that this stretch of land was a Neotropical corridor. Animals such as capybaras and giant armadillos that wouldn’t have ventured farther north used this strip of humid grassland to move from Mexico to Texas to Florida.
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