If a mighty Ice Age saber-toothed tiger screamed in the woods and no one was around to hear it, would it make any noise? I tried to answer that philosophical question by investigating whether it roars violently or emits an intense roar. They found that a small bone in the tiger’s throat may give a more subtle answer. their discovery Posted on August 21st morphology journal.
[Related: Life in Los Angeles was brutal for saber-toothed cats.]
The current cat belongs to two subfamilies A person who speaks differently. Leopards or “big cats” usually include roaring lions, jaguars, and tigers. Felidae or “little cats” include domestic cats, ocelots, lynxes, and purring cougars. for a barking cat structures surrounding the larynx (or voicebox) generally isn’t stiff enough to gurgle.
“Evolutionarily speaking, sabertooths split from the cat family tree before any other modern group,” said study co-author Adam Hartstone-Rose, a North Carolina biologist. said in a statement. “This means that lions are more like domestic cats than saber-toothed.
The utterance is Soft tissue of the larynx and throat, not bones. But anatomists have noticed that the bones responsible for holding these tissues in place, called hyoid bones, are different in number and size in purring and barking cats.
“Humans only have one hyoid bone, but purring cats have nine chained bones, and barking cats have seven,” says co-author Dr. says Dr.Student Ashley Deutsch said in a statement. “The missing bone is located on top of the hyoid structure, near its connection to the skull.”
according to the teamA saber-toothed tiger has only seven bones. The structure of the hyoid bone is eerily similar in shape and size to that of a purr cat.. If the vocalizations were related to the number of bones in the hyoid structure, then the sabertooth roared. However, when it comes to shape, it might be purring.
“You could argue that they roared because they only have seven saber-tooth bones, but that’s not the whole story,” says Heartstone-Rose. “The anatomy is a strange one. It doesn’t have the extra bones that purr cats have, but the shape and size of the hyoid bone is unique. Some of them are shaped like purr cats. Some are there, but they are much larger than that.
[Related: Orangutans can make two sounds at the same time.]
according to the teamif the bone is missing ( hyoid bone) were key to different vocalizations, the bones most closely associated with them should look different in purrs and louders. These bones actually looked very much like the shapes of different breeds of purring cats.
The research team identified more changes in the shape of bones close to the vocal organs, such as the thyrohyoid and basal hyoid bones. The fact that these important hyoid bones are shaped like those of a purring cat suggests that they were purring like kittens rather than roaring like lions. Maybe it shows, but it’s still a bit of a prehistoric mystery.
“Probably the size of the hyoid bone most likely influences the pitch of vocalization,” Deutsch said. “nevertheless Smilodon Although not as large as the largest living cat, its hyoid bone is much larger than any of its extant relatives, suggesting it may have had a deeper cry than even the largest tigers and lions. there is. “
