Saber-tooth or sabre-tooth, as you wish or wherever you're from, refers to huge-toothed animals from the Cenozoic period . Those teeth were powerful we must say. Huge, at least.
Many people say "saber-tooth tigers" when they are talking about them. Well, that is not the right name because they were unlike tigers. They were mostly like lions for a couple of reasons. One of them is that sabertooth were social hunting animals while tigers usually hunt alone.
Those huge tooth leads us to think they were great hunters. Paleonthologists made some studies to describe their way to hunt. Some say that those animals used their teeth to grab the prey. But it's not for sure, because if they hunted a very large animal they could break and that didn't happen so often as shown by the fossils.
Other paleonthologists say that sabertooth cats* technique was biting in the soft belly or throat of their preys causing a fatal wound. Then, they waited until their prey died.
It was more than cats that were sabertoothed. During mammal history, varied animals as for exemple dogs, bears, weasels had those huge teeth as well. Even marsupial animals got to be sabertoothed. By the way, marsupial refers to animals that carry their puppies like the kanguroo does.
Sabertooth cats usually (just a tshirt) hunt horses.
*and they were bobtail
Work cited
Carroll, R.L. 1988. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. W.H. Freeman & Co., New York.
Mestel, R. 1993. Saber-toothed tales. Discover, April, pp. 50-59.
Radinsky, L., and S. Emerson. 1982. The late, great sabertooths. Natural History 91(4).
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