Abstract
Los félidos de dientes de sable, los macairodontinos, han ejercido una especial atracción entre los paleontólogos durante muchas décadas, no sólo por su espectacular morfología, sino también debido a que son un llamativo ejemplo de evolución convergente, probablemente ligada a una fuerte presión selectiva. En este trabajo suministramos una recopilación de los cambios de interpretación acerca de su anatomía functional y evolución, desde las primeras hipótesis en las que se proponía un ataque por apuñalamiento y un control pleitrópico del complejo morfológico macairodontino, hasta los actuales puntos de vista que favorecen un modelo de mordedura muy especializado y una evolución en mosaico de los carácteres anatómicos.
Highlights
Few mammalian fossils have attracted as much interest among both palaeontologists and the wider public as the sabre-toothed, or machairodontine, cats
Despite an undoubtedly cat-like appearance, are so obviously different from living species, an assumption underlying many attempts to interpret the functional morphology of the machairodonts has been that they preyed on unusually large and usually thick-skinned ungulates, or “pachyderms” to use an obsolete term, as exemplified in the paper by Simpson (1941) and more recent authors (Anyonge, 1996; Bakker, 1998)
While the overall morphology is still very far from the functional complex seen in the Plio-Pleistocene sabre-toothed crown taxa, it is again most plausibly interpreted as an adaptation to quick and efficient killing of prey close in size to the predator
Summary
Few mammalian fossils have attracted as much interest among both palaeontologists and the wider public as the sabre-toothed, or machairodontine, cats. Like Martin, they considered that a canine shear-bite to the throat of an immobilised prey would be more plausible than a bite to the belly, based, for instance, on consideration of the relative sizes of a skull of Megantereon and the neck of a horse
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