For nearly 35,000 years, the remains of a long-extinct saber-toothed cub lay preserved in permafrost in the Indigirka River basin of Yakutia, Russia.
In 2020, a team of Russian scientists stumbled upon the cub and freed it from the ice so that they could examine it, and on November 14, they finally made their findings available to the public.
“It’s a fantastic feeling to see with your own eyes the life appearance of a long-extinct animal,” chief researcher Alexey V. Lopatin told CNN after his work was published in Scientific Reports. “Especially when it comes to such an interesting predator as the saber-toothed cat.”
The saber-toothed cat, commonly referred to as the saber-toothed tiger, is a prehistoric carnivore known for their 8-inch canines — but this cub was frozen in time at only 3 weeks old, and still had its “baby teeth.”
The researchers were blown away by the mummified specimen, from its soft fur to the “toe beans” on its front paw pads. Amazingly, the entirety of the cub’s head, torso, and forearms survived across thousands of centuries due to its preservation in permafrost.
The cat belongs to the extinct subfamily Machairodontinae and is a distant relative of the big cats of today. In their report, Lopatin emphasized the importance of their discovery.
“For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied,” Lopatin and his colleagues wrote.
The closest approximation to a discovery on this scale happened in 2013, when scientists unearthed the fossil of a Panthera blytheae, a previously unrecorded species with ties to the modern-day snow leopard.
Graham Slater, the scientist who examined the fossil firsthand, told Smithsonian Insider that the species solved “a missing link” in the timeline of “big cat evolution.”
“Scientists are now closer to understanding the evolutionary origin of big cats and are gathering data about their habitat,” Slater said, explaining that the fossil indicated that ancient big cats lived nearly 6 million years ago — 2 million years earlier than scientists previously estimated.
In their research, Slater and his colleagues studied how the Panthera blytheae adapted to the environmental challenges of its time, which informed the projected sustainability of contemporary snow leopards.
The discovery also brought heightened awareness to the conservation of snow leopards, which were on a dramatic decline.
Thanks to education campaigns centered on helping humans and leopards coexist with each other, significant progress has been made in habitat protection and species conservation over the last decade.
In 2017, conservationists celebrated a huge milestone when the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the snow leopard from endangered to vulnerable on its Red List of Threatened Species.
As of now, it’s unclear how the latest big cat discovery — of the mummified saber-toothed cub — will inform future conservation efforts. But paleontologist Jack Tseng believes that a “treasure trove of information” awaits them.
“It’s rare to find bones of this lineage in the first place, let alone soft tissue associated with it,” Tseng told CNN.
“I don’t know if other paleontologists’ minds are as blown as mine, but it’s like reality changes now that we’ve seen this.”
Header image via Marcus Herzberg
