Don’t know if you heard. Someone just found a sabertooth kitten. It was dead, but still. It was fresh from the permafrost in Siberia and fully coated in rich reddish-brown fur. Only the head and forepaws remained, and in order for it to be so spectacularly mummified, it would have had to be buried quickly, and frozen. I can picture the little nipper chasing some chilly prehistoric shrew and jamming its adorable head with its little fuzzy ears into a hole when the frozen ground collapsed. The back bits were maybe scavenged right off but the buried bits stayed adorable for 35,000 years, and now we know what they look like. I cannot begin to parse why this feels so important.
It’s remarkable and a tribute to humanity that scientists can figure out so much about ancient creatures, from the slimmest of clues. We may be a sad, silly, doomed species, but we have Mozart, and hospice nurses, and now we have a sabertooth kitten head and people who know how to study it.
There is no protruding toothage. Science has estimated our little friend was three weeks old. Or, to give it its due, 35,000 years and three weeks old. It was dug out of a frozen riverbank in a sparkle of ice crystals and embedded in a protective cushion of sabertooth fairy dust.
Oh yes.There had to be a Sabertooth Fairy. I’m no expert, but these are mammals, and if they were born with saber teeth, I’m pretty sure Mom would have shut the door on their particular evolutionary track right quick.
Sabertooth cats do not have long, curved, conical teeth, like the canines of modern dogs or cats or Ricky Gervais, but long, curved, flat teeth with serrated edges. Which makes them somewhat more fragile. Rather than using them to puncture and immobilize prey at the neck vertebrae, it is assumed they used their massive claws to grob onto a large animal and then slash the Bejesus out of their bellies or throats with their saber teeth. Then they pop off behind a tree and wait for their prey to bleed out, quickly. Then it’s lunchtime. Yes, this happened before Bejesus existed, which just goes to show the retroactive impact he had.
A lot can be surmised by a critter’s dentition, and musculature, and the like. If, for instance, I were swallowed up by a landslide and dug up thousands of years from now, they’d take one look at my teeth—a chaotic jumble, not ever acting in concert and apparently in full stampede—and determine that I was a Jell-O-vore. They’d go further than that. I was obviously a social creature, because nothing—not my riotous teeth, not my spindly musculature, not the discovery of my remains in an deposit of maple sugar—indicated I would survive long without the support of my tribe. And I wouldn’t.
One thing that did disturb me was the passing mention that the kitten was found by scavengers searching for mammoth tusks in eastern Siberia. Uh-oh. Nothing about this sounded good, so I looked it up, and sure enough, it’s boom time for tusk-hunters. A mammoth tusk can net the finder the same amount of money he might make in a year at the crappy job he no longer has. So itinerant tusk prospectors are assaulting the riverbanks of Siberia with earth-moving equipment, evicting the topsoil, eroding the streams, smashing the landscape, and otherwise destroying the environment for short-term gain. Because money. Because our systems, world-wide, are set up to balloon the wealth of the wealthy, and not to benefit or support the concerns of the vast human sphere. It is simply a miracle, and an oversight, that whoever found a half a kitten did not recognize its worth, and it ended up in the hands of scientists and not collectors. Hobbyists. Hoarders.
The hind end was probably as well preserved as the front end but lost during excavation, which can be really violent if you’re prospecting for large items, gold or coal. Conversely if these guys weren’t out looking for other things, these tiny bits of fluff would never be found.
Hydraulic mining (using large diameter hoses and high pressure water) is a common technique in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic and fossil by-catch is fairly common. This is mostly bone with the occasional mummy. The book, Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe by R. Dale Guthrie describes the variety of mummies found up to that point (1990) and is also a great read.
For some reason I am imagining a fire hose blasting a mummy into the sky and I am very cheered-up indeed.
What an interesting sounding book, of course my public library doesn’t have it…..but I did find a used copy on line that is even now probably being packed up to start its trip to my house. Thanks Bruce Mohn for the suggestion.
You’re welcome!
Another book you might all enjoy is Journey to the Ice Age by Rien Poortvliet . This is a coffee table book chock full of illustrations by the author and illustrator of the Gnomes books, who not surprisingly was also a naturalist. Journey to the Ice Age is an illustrated and written account of the wildlife and human life of Holland going from modern times into the Middle Ages and finally into the Pleistocene, exploring the lives of people and animals, each page adding an older species to the chronicle with beautifully written natural histories coupled with Poortvliet’s illustrations. It was pricey when it first came out, but is now very reasonably priced.
I know a certain religious person who believes that such finds were planted by the devil to trick us into believing that evolution is real, when we all know for a fact that Noah only saved all of the species directed by god, including, apparently, fleas, ticks, tapeworms, Norway rats, and the ancestors of donald effing trump.
I know a few of those too. On the other hand I was a conventionally religious person in Bible college studying to be a pastor when I decided to collect fossils on the side. The boulders around the campus appeared to be encrusted with marine fossils. I assumed they had grown there like barnacles during the Flood. But over the course of semester I reduced a one ton boulder to gravel, finding fossils all the way through it. I then concluded the rock was a chunk of ancient seabed and not knowing any processes that could turn mud to rock in anything other than long periods of time, concluded it was evidence that the earth was a whole lot older than the Bible suggested. And that opened all kinds of avenues for further thought.
Thank you for sharing that story, Bruce. The true history of the earth is so much more beautiful, awe-inspiring, mysterious and exhilarating than any religious story dreamed up by humans could ever be. I enjoy reading Richard Dawkins. Also loved the book “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shubin.
Seems to me that such a person as you describe is pretty good evidence there ISN’T evolution.
So fascinating. I believe the fairy protected it from the tusk predators, too. So fortunate it ended up with scientists.
Good heavens, now I’m thinking of the Tusk Fairy! The Tusk Fairy must be enormous.
I prefer the evolution story over the bible one too. I like archaeology and paleontology and all those other people who randomly find things that prove how old the earth is and how long ago people actually lived. I shall look for the books mentioned here.
I myself seem to have alerted an algorithm that continuously serves me pictures of mummies.
A non sequitur here. Several posts ago, someone here mentioned that if you hard boil eggs with salt in the water, they peel more easily. I’m here to thank them as it seems to work! I get my eggs from a farm market, so they are fresh. I always had trouble peeling them until now. I like having them in the fridge as a snack rather than something that’s junk. They tide me over until the next meal when I’m feeling peckish.
So whoever you were, thanks!
When I was researching all this once, I landed on the New York Times Cooking method–can’t remember what it is, I have to write all this down–because they explained having tries all the methods, but stated right off “If anyone tells you their method is fool-proof, they’re lying.”
Well, nothing is completely fool-proof, because fools are so ingenious.
I just returned from a visit to the Oregon History and Culture Museum where the collection includes carbon dated 14,000 yr old human poop, the oldest shoes found so far (14,000 yrs old and made of twined sage- some of them look like clogs and others like Birkenstocks) the first horse fossils (the size of a very small dog) and saber tooth tiger claws found in the Willamette Valley. There is stuff older than Sasquatch here.
To be fair, Sasquatch is just a pup. Don’t you love that stuff? Of course we got some of our fossils from Bloat ‘n’ Float, when things died and gassed up and rolled on shore.
For a gripping true tale of Siberian Tiger poachers in the same part of the world, see John Vaillant’s book “The Tiger.” I couldn’t put it down. (In a TED talk, he told the audience that one of the rules he learned studying tigers is “Have sex with your partner as often and as loudly as possible.”)
Wait, let me jot that down.
Sabertooth Fairy asks the question, what the hell do we put under our pillows to placate them?
Hi Barbara!
I never thought of the tooth under the pillow being a placating activity. I just saw it as a commercial exchange. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we did the tooth fairy activity in my family. The kid who lived behind us certainly did. He swore he’d seen Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and his parents paid visits to my parents after the Mohn children told him it was just a faerie tale.
I didn’t believe in any of that stuff after I left cookies and milk for Santa one time and they went untouched. However. I was avaricious enough to pretend to so that I could conceivably get more presents.
You put your sabertooth in there, of course, and there’s a bright shiny quarter in it for you!
https://www.aol.com/news/return-dire-wolf-125033012.html
This came up in my news feed and I thought it might interest y’all, especially Murr and Bruce. It certainly ticked a lot of my nerd boxes: Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and mythology.
It popped up in my feed today as well and immediately my bullshit light went on. The photos of the animals look like wolves and if you read the Time article, the creators at Colossal indicate that they produced their wolves by tinkering with gray wolf DNA. What’s the problem with that? Well, recent DNA work on dire wolves indicates they diverged from the line that leads to gray wolves five million years ago. They’re very, very distant relatives.
What Colossal hopes it has produced is a gray wolf at the upper end of their size range. Basically a rather small Game of Thrones dire wolf, in other words an animal that has never existed.
I have no expertise. I have been pumped about the woolly mammoth project for a while. I do sort of feel for the poor woolly mice, and imagine them tipping over onto their little tusks for lack of avoirdupois, and impaling themselves and starving to death.
Another very good debunk of the claim can be found in Michael Simpson’s piece at https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/dire-wolf-has-not-been-brought-back-from-extinction/