Don't be fooled by those sinister fangs: For saber-toothed cats, much of the killing power was concentrated in the front limbs. The long canine teeth that gave the extinct cat its name are an unmistakable feature, protruding from the snarling faces of models in natural history museums everywhere.
But while those fangs were deadly, their great length also made them delicate and liable to break if the cat's prey jostled and writhed in an attempt to escape. Researcher Julie Meachen-Samuels had an idea how such a precarious killing device could have evolved: The cats had incredibly strong front limbs to hold down prey while they used their saber teeth to cut them up. For a study that appears in the journal PLoS One, the team x-rayed the bones of many saber-toothed cats (Smilodon fatalis), and compared them to a variety of modern-day cats. According to Meachen-Samuels:
Species with longer limbs ...
