Nimravids, the false sabre-tooths
Cat-like predators with sabre teeth evolve — but they are not cats, and they do it first.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 11 million years
- Known to
- ± 1 million years
- Era
- Oligocene, Cenozoic
Nimravids look convincingly like sabre-toothed cats, with the same blade-like upper canines and short powerful forelimbs, and for a long time they were classified as such. They are in fact a separate carnivoran family, distinguished by details of the ear region, and they evolve the sabre-tooth form tens of millions of years before true sabre-toothed felids do. Together with the later barbourofelids and the marsupial Thylacosmilus in South America, they make the sabre-tooth one of the most repeatedly reinvented designs in mammal evolution.