Sabertooth That Roamed South America 3 Million Years Ago Had Large Canine, Pushing Its Eyes to the Sides of the Head [Study]

Sabertooth had extreme canines that extended up to their skulls affecting their eye sockets. The arrangement of their eyes had reportedly affected their eyesight.

Sabertooth's Extreme Canines Forced Their Eyes to the Sides

The extinct marsupials had huge teeth forcing their eyes to move to the sides of their heads. Scientists at the Instituto Argentino de Nivología, Glaciología, y Ciencias Ambientales in Argentina modeled the skull of Thylacosmilus - an extinct hypercarnivore that lived in South America three million years ago, Daily Mail reported.

According to the researchers, sabertooth could not see well in 3D because their eyes were positioned far away from each other to allow their huge canines to grow.

The sabertooth's teeth were reportedly "ever-growing." They did not wear down, and their roots extended right up front of the creature's skull and round to its rear.

Despite the position of their eyes, sabertooth was still a successful predator because its eye sockets jutted outwards, giving them a sufficiently wide field of vision.

Thylacosmilus or Thylacosmilus atrox is an extinct genus of sabertoothed metatherian mammals that weighed 220 pounds before they were fully developed. They have to be carried in their mother's pouches while growing up.

They also have eyes on the side of their head like horses and cows, which led researchers to wonder how it affected their eyesight.

The outlet added that if the fields of vision in each eye did not overlap sufficiently, they would have struggled to see the world in three dimensions and determine the position of prey.

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New Sabertooth Species With Specialized Teeth for Tearing Discovered

In a previous report from Science Times, paleontologists from San Diego Natural History Museum discovered a sabertooth roaming around California more than 40 million years ago. The team named the new species Diegoaelurus vanvalkenburghae and is declared to be among the earliest known examples of mammals adopting a cat-like approach in their all-meat diet, MailOnline reported.

The fossils found in 1988 at a construction site in Oceanside, California, had a lower jaw like a cat. The team used a modern approach to identify and discovered it belonged to a previously unknown machaeroidine, one of the five now-extinct sabertooth predators.

The early meat-eating predator and its relatives represent a sort of evolutionary experiment of how the first hypercarnivore lived and evolved into modern cats, Mirage News reported. However, the machaeroidines are poorly understood because of the lack of fossil specimens, with only a handful from Wyoming and Asia. Scientists were not sure whether multiple species lived in the same period.

Study co-author Shawn Zack said the analysis of fossils showed that achaeroidines were more diverse than initially thought. They also discovered that the smaller form lived almost simultaneously, raising the possibility that more species were waiting to be discovered.