Author: Matthew Taub / Source: Atlas Obscura
Today, the beaches of Miramar are no doubt covered in the footprints of visitors to this resort town on Argentina’s coast. But once—at least 10,000 years ago, during the Late Pleistocene—it was a sabre-toothed cat who prowled the area, and was nice enough to leave behind some fossilized tracks.
The prints were discovered, not far from the city’s commercial center, in September 2015 by researchers from the local Punta Hermengo Municipal Museum. The scale of the prints—about 7.5 inches in diameter, significantly larger than even the biggest left by modern lions—suggested that they were left by Smilodon populator, a species of sabre-toothed cat known, from fossilized bones, to have lived in the region. But footprints, or any other non-bone traces of…
The post Found: The First Known Footprints of an Elusive Sabre-Toothed Cat appeared first on FeedBox.