Big Kitties | A Little Long in the Tooth Mystery Cache

This cache has been archived.

WI.Hibiscus: seldom|seen let me know that the "thing" at GZ that made this cache so much fun is no longer there. With no hiding spot, it seems that archive is the only thing to do here.

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Hidden : 9/28/2009
Difficulty:
2 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:


This idea for a cache was born out of a recent series I published that looks at the early history of the earth. Actually, this idea spawned that one, not the other way around. I am often struck by the loose interpretation of prehistoric eras and the various animals often misrepresented roaming around together in such a vast expanse of time. Take the overreaching movie, 10,000 BC which featured Smilodons, Mammoths and Phorusrhacids competing with early humans for resources, and in Egypt no less. While these creates did exist, they didn't all share the same space and time. If there were any big cats still around then, they would have been confined to the Americas. So too would the Terror Birds but they would have been extinct for nearly 2 million years by the time this plot line got moving. Mammoths shared the same time frame, as did mastodons and sloths, and they even outlasted the big cats which disappeared at the end of the ice age, about 10,000 years ago. But even these woolly guys are almost always grossly exaggerated in size, like their cat couterparts, being in reality no larger than the tallest modern elephant.

So, it's no surprise than most of us have a hard time distinguishing animals from eras, since all we have are sensational movies and sci-fi fiction as our common frame of reference. We witness myth-making where mammoths are seen plodding around with velociraptors at their heals and pterodactyls over their heads and can't tell what is based on the fossil record and what is mere pulp fiction.

This cache is about clarifying the time frame of one animal that is so frequently misrepresented as living in the age of the dinosaurs when in fact, they didn't appear until about 30 million years after dinosaurs went extinct. I speak of course of The Sabertooth Tiger. Here's a little research to get you up to speed with these big kitties.



The sheer size of a saber-tooth cat's canines can make it seem like eating or attacking prey would be a problem. But saber-tooth cats had the ability to open their mouths very wide to make up for the extreme length of their teeth. Smilodon fatalis could open its mouth up to AFE° wide.

Unlike the enormous depiction in the film, Sabertooth cats were actually smaller that today's Lion, averaging J'J" in length and C' high at the shoulder. In fact, there were even smaller animals that went a little long in the tooth like Thylacosmilus, a saber-tooth marsupial that lived in South America between H.G and J.C million years ago, which was about the size of a large house cat.

And, the only true cat that has been suggested as a real threat to early man was Megantereon. It was built like a modern jaguar, had stocky forelimbs with the lower half of these forelimbs lion-sized. It had large neck muscles designed to power a devastating bite. Yet, the largest specimens had an estimated body weight of only 90-150 kg from India and the smallest forms from Africa were estimated to be just D0-70 kg. However, other sources estimated Megantereon from the European lower Pleistocene at 100-1B0 kg. Indeed, one specimen examined by M. Mendoza for body mass was estimated to have a weight of AII.8 lbs That's a big cat, but still a far cry from the mean weight of a modern lion at 426.2 lbs. But then, if one of these guys was after me with its formidable looking canines, I'd be inclined to run too!

Permission granted by property owner, Tom, to place this cache and also to park virtually right next to it.

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