Canada’s first sabre-toothed cat fossil found in Medicine Hat

Aside from Smilodon, local ice age predators included lions, scimitar cats

Smilodon fatalis, commonly known as the ‘sabre-toothed tiger’ was a huge predator during the last ice age. Scientists have now confirmed it lived in Canada at that time. (Henry Sharpe)
During the last ice age, huge cats bigger than an African lion prowled Alberta — including the fearsome beast commonly known as the “sabre-toothed tiger,” a new study shows.

The proper name for the extinct predator with foot-long, serrated knife-like canines is Smilodon fatalis.

And up until the discovery of the fossil from Medicine Hat, Alta., the species had never been found further north than Idaho.

That’s why a couple of small fossils caught Ashley Reynolds’s eye as she was rummaging through the drawers at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

“What struck me is they were listed as being Smilodon from Alberta,” recalled Reynolds, a PhD student in paleontology at the University of Toronto. “And I knew that Smilodon wasn’t really considered to be a Canadian species.”

Ashley Reynolds, lead author of the new study, holds the Smilodon fatalis metacarpal from Medicine Hat, Alta. On the table are a S. fatalis skull and canine tooth from Peru. (Danielle Dufault/Royal Ontario Museum)

The drawer was part of a trove of 1,200 specimens collected in the 1960s by University of Toronto paleontologist C.S. Churcher and his team from the bluffs along the South Saskatchewan River near Medicine Hat that had been roughly sorted but never examined in detail.

Reynolds, who was researching the growth patterns and life histories of extinct cats by looking at their bones, decided to look more carefully at what cat fossils Churcher had found so they could be used in further research.

One of the fossils labelled “Smilodon” was too small a piece to be identified.

But another, a bone from the ancient cat’s right front paw, was identical other Smilodon bones from the same part of the body, and was positively identified as Canada’s first Smilodon.

Reynolds and colleagues published their findings Friday in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. The study was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

This is the sabre-toothed cat skeleton on display in the Royal Ontario Museum’s Reed Gallery of the Age of Mammals. This specimen from 1937 comes from Los Angeles’s La Brea Tar Pits, which were also known as Rancho La Brea. (Wanda Dobrowlanski/Royal Ontario Museum)

Smilodons or sabre-toothed cats are an extinct group of big cats with huge canines flattened and serrated like knife blades.

“They’re literally like holding steak knives in your mouth,” said Reynolds.

Their flattened shape made them fragile and prone to breaking, she added. That’s probably why sabre-toothed cats had a shorter and stockier build than lions and tigers — to better pin their prey down and prevent struggles that might break their teeth.