Product Description
Our Plastic Smilodon (Saber-Toothed Cat) Our small plastic Smilodon (saber-toothed cat) toy is just the right size replica for your prehistoric life shoebox diorama. This little Smilodon model will fit in a shoe box along with other examples of extinct animals from the Earth's past. Add a few rocks, plants, grass, make a river or stream from anything that strikes your imagination, and there you go - a scene of life on our planet as it might have been millions of years ago. Our plastic toy Eocene mammal is painted to look the way paleontologists imagine the animal looked in real life, although of course nobody really knows.
Smilodon is an extinct genus of machairodont felid. It is one of the most famous prehistoric mammals, and the best known saber-toothed cat. Although commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger, it was not closely related to the tiger or other modern cats. Smilodon lived in the Americas during the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 mya–10,000 years ago). The genus was named in 1842, based on fossils from Brazil. Three species are recognized today: S. gracilis, S. fatalis, and S. populator. The two latter species were probably descended from S. gracilis, which itself probably evolved from Megantereon. The largest collection of Smilodon fossils has been obtained from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California.