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A mislabeled fossil, forgotten and stored in a museum drawer for decades, is actually more special than previously thought. The skull fossil belongs to an ancient species of saber-toothed cat that roamed western North America about five million years ago.
In 2022, Narimane Chatar was a graduate student in paleontology, visiting museum collections around the world with her surface scanner for her research on saber-toothed cats. He was going through drawers at the American Museum of Natural History in New York when he stumbled upon something unusual.
“I saw this skull that was labeled Pseudaeluro”, she tells him popular science.
This genus name (Pseudaeluro) It has typically been used to describe anything that looks like a cat, but whose lineage cannot be assessed. This surprised her because the skull was complete. “I thought it might be assigned to a more particular species,” he says.
Chatar, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, was busy completing her PhD at the time, so she didn’t have the bandwidth to do further research. Once he finally had some free time last summer, he decided to take another look at the specimen.
Using scans he had made during his visit to New York, Chatar made a 3D model of the fossil to compare with other scans of fossils he had made at various museums.
“I basically took the 3D model of the specimen, opened it on one screen, and then opened other 3D models on the other screen and compared them,” he explains.
This process confirmed his years-old hunch. The skull belonged to Adelphailurus kansensis, a species the size of a puma that until now was only known from fragments of jaw and teeth. The findings, recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontologyclarify A. kansensis’ place within the family tree of saber-toothed cats. They also allow researchers to finally understand their cranial anatomy. In fact, an artist was able to reconstruct the animal’s appearance for the first time.
When most people think of a saber-toothed cat, they probably think of species with extremely long upper teeth, such as Smilodon, which had canines that could grow up to eight inches. A. kansensis It is a more primitive species and still has short upper canines. Learning more about this can help researchers understand how SmilodonThe extreme morphology evolved later.
The study also highlights the importance of reviewing historical collections, according to Chatar. “The specimen had been there for 50, 60 years, lost in drawers, labeled differently,” he says. “It reminds us that it’s very important to go back to those collections and open every drawer.”
In fact, Chatar says that some of the best fossils in museums are actually not on view. “We have little treasures hidden from the public in all the museums.”
Scientists still have a lot to learn A. kansensis. It’s unclear what the prehistoric cat looked like underneath its skull, and that data could help researchers understand how the species ran and captured its prey.
“Who knows, maybe there is some material waiting to be discovered in another museum,” Chatar concludes.
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