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In the film "10,000 BC," a band of hunters venture on an epic quest, overcoming prehistoric monsters to end up at a land of gods and pyramids. The fantastic creatures depicted in the movie — from the giant carnivorous birds to saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths — actually once existed. The most famous of the saber-toothed cats was Smilodon, a group of predators often dubbed saber-toothed tigers, although they were not actually close relatives of the modern tiger. Ironically, Smilodon was recently found to have had a relatively weak bite.

On the Ecological Connection Between Sabre-tooths and Hominids: Faunal Dispersal Events in the Lower Pleistocene and a Review of the Evidence for the First Human Arrival in Europe  Alfonso ArribasMuseo Geominero, Instituto Tecnológico Geominero de España. Ríos Rosas, 23. 28003 Madrid, Spain.Paul PalmqvistDepartamento de Geología y Ecología (Área de Paleontología), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Málaga. 29071 Málaga, Spain. A reconstruction of a community of the large mammals of the Grecian Pleistocene .African Species in the Lower Pleistocene of Europe …The sabre-tooth genus Megantereon shares much in common with Smilodon, and both genera form the tribe Smilodontini. The earliest...

Sabertooth cats and other super-toothy predators apparently possessed mighty arms that they used to help them kill. The beefy arms would have served to pin down prey and protect the ferocious-looking teeth of the feline predators, which were actually fragile enough to fracture, scientists find. The finding also may hold for other knife-fanged prehistoric carnivores; long before sabertooth cats evolved, a number of now-extinct toothy hunters once roamed the Earth. These included the nimravids, or false sabertooth cats, which lived from 7 million to 42 million years ago alongside a sister group to cats known as barbourofelids, which lived from...

archaeologists say could be the biggest fossil find in Pinellas County in nearly a century... The jaw and tooth weigh 65 pounds and are about a yard long. Sarti-Sweeney took the bones home and, after some online research with her older brother, determined the football-sized rock was actually the tooth of a long-extinct mammoth. Paleontology and archaeology experts have confirmed the find, and recent digging at the site has turned up teeth and bones from a second mammoth, giant sloths, camels, turtles with shells up to 6-feet-long, saber-toothed cats and giant armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Scientists believe the...

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen in north-central Germany is famous for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden weapons or artifacts uncovered there by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Hartmut Thieme between 1994 and 1998 at an open-cast lignite mine. Deposited in organic sediments at a former lakeshore, they were found in combination with the remains of about 16,000 animal bones, including 20 wild horses, whose bones featured numerous butchery marks, including one pelvis that still had a spear protruding from it. The finds are considered evidence that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits as early as...

...the First Evidence of the Prehistoric Predator Roaming the State at the End of the Ice Age Between 13,605 and 13,460 Years Ago.The sabertoothed cat (Smilodon) is one of the best-known genera of the machairodont, an extinct subfamily of carnivoran mammals of the family Felidae (true cats). They are popularly referred to as "sabertoothed tigers", although they are not closely related to tigers (Panthera).The genus was named in 1842 based on fossils from Brazil; the generic name means "scalpel" or "two-edged knife" combined with "tooth".Researchers discovered the remarkably well-preserved skull in Page County, southwest Iowa...The skull belonged to a subadult...

The ancient sabretooth is not directly related to modern day cats, according to a new DNA analysis. Large cats such as the sabretooth roamed North and South America toward the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. The puma, also known as a mountain lion or cougar, and the jaguar are the only remaining large cats in the Western Hemisphere. Paleontologists have closely studied the extinct American cats based on their bone structure, but the proposed relationships remain contentious. To refine the branches of the feline family tree, Ross Barnett of the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre...

Sabre-toothed tiger was just a pussycat By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 12:01am BST 02/10/2007 It may have had some of the most ferocious teeth ever seen on a mammal but scientists say that the much feared sabre-tooth tiger was actually a bit of a pussycat. Smilodon, the sabre-tooth tiger, roamed across North and South America until 10,000 years ago Powerfully built, with upper canines like knives, the sabre-tooth tiger was a fearsome predator of Ice-Age America's lost giants, such as bison and horses, perhaps even mammoths. But while Smilodon ("knife tooth") may have had an impressive set of...