The American lion (Panthera atrox) may have roared, while the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis may have produced vocalizations similar to living purring cats but at a lower frequency.
Modern cats belong to one of two groups: either the pantherine ‘big cats,’ including the roaring lions, tigers and jaguars; or Felinae ‘little cats,’ which include purring cats like lynxes, cougars, ocelots and domestic cats.
“Evolutionarily speaking, sabertooths split off the cat family tree before these other modern groups did,” North Carolina State University’s Professor Adam Hartstone-Rose.
“This means that lions are more closely related to housecats than either are to sabertooths.”
“That’s important because the debate over the kind of vocalization a sabertooth tiger would have made relies upon analyzing the anatomy of a handful of tiny bones located in the throat.”
“And the size, shape and number of those bones differ between modern roaring and purring cats.”
Although vocalization is driven by the larynx and soft tissue in the throat, not bones, anatomists noticed that the bones responsible for anchoring those tissues in place — the hyoid bones — differed in size and number between roaring and purring cats.
“While humans have only one hyoid bone, purring cats have nine bones linked together in a chain and roaring cats have seven,” said Ashley Deutsch, a Ph.D. student at North Carolina State University.
“The missing bones are located toward the top of the hyoid structure near where it connects to the skull.”
“Because saber-toothed tigers only have seven bones in their hyoid structure, the argument has been that of course they roared,” Professor Hartstone-Rose said.
“But when we looked at the anatomy of modern cats, we realized that there isn’t really hard evidence to support this idea, since the bones themselves aren’t responsible for the vocalization.”
“That relationship between the number of bones and the sound…
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