It’s a textual and linguistic question. I think Jesus said “cable” using an Aramaic word, but there’s also the explanation that He was doing a word-play, that the audience would have recognized that the Greek for “camel” was practically the same word as the Aramaic for “cable”, and Jesus was doing a double play: no one would try to put a cable through the eye of a needle, and certainly trying to put a camel through would be utterly ridiculous!
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Skeletons prove that such creatures lived. The jaw opened to 120 degrees, far wider than in any modern cats.
The use of the long fangs was to inflict fatal wounds to a large-sized prey. After a rapid surprise attack and a bite that severed arteries, the cat probably retreated and watched until the prey died. The prey animals were large and dangerous, such as cubs of mammoths. When the cat attacked, the mother of the cub would have also attacked, so the cat needed to escape after a bite. The huge and sharp fangs acted like knives and ensured that a single bite caused fatal damage, at least if the cat managed to bite in the throat. The cats were large and heavy (160 to 470 kg) and wrestled the prey to ground with their muscular forelimbs, so a surprise attack would probably have been enough to make the prey fall to the side, which exposed the throat.
The arteries of large mammals are deep beneath a thick skin and fur. Cutting the arteries demanded long ‘knives’, which favoured individuals with long fangs. Modern lions or tigers could not have caused fatal wounds to such prey, at least not alone.
I have seen a video of lions attacking an elephant. It demands a big lion pack and and repeated attacks before an elephant would die to ‘thousand cuts’. Any elephant getting the support of other elephants would probably survive even an attack by a big lion pack.
Another example showing why huge fangs would be beneficial are fights between tigers and brown bear. Romans arranged such fights on Colosseum, so we know what happens. A tiger is stronger and deadlier than a lion but the thick fur and skin of a bear protects the bear from serious wounds when a tiger attacks. The bear wins, in all cases, because the fangs of a tiger are too short to cause fatal wounds.
By the way, white sharks use a similar kind of strategy when they hunt potentially dangerous seals. The shark makes a rapid surprise attack from below, with one bite. Then the shark retreats and waits until the seal dies or is weakened to the point where the seal is not anymore a danger.
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IIRC sabre-toothed predators evolved independently multiple times…
…7 times, apparently, though the first two are nowhere near as pronounced as the other 5.
So technically it wasn’t a real creature, and it wasn’t a tiger. It was lots of real creatures.
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I’m actually not sure if you are being serious here. We have a couple thousand skeletal remains from the tar pits alone. We even have permafrost preserved carcasses complete to the fur.
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I read a while back that some private foundation wants to take DNA from such a carcass and bring back the sabertooth.
It’s a bizarre idea, to me primarily because the poor creatures would have no natural habitat; the world in which they thrived has shifted into something very different. If they want to bring some species back they should look to ones wiped out by humans in historical times.
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As I’m sure you are aware, a company called Colossal has “brought back” Dire wolves. They are aiming to de-extinct the wholly mammoth and, in the process, created “wholly mice”:
If this technology were to be used for anything, I would argue it should be used to de-extinct animals that humans have killed recently, like the Dodo bird, since their ecosystems still survive and still need their involvement.
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I saw in one mammoth bone hunting document how the group found a complete sabertooth cub from permafrost. Frozen so that even the smallest details were preserved. Such carcasses could give enough of DNA for creating something that resembles the original.
The first important question to solve in such a plan is to ask what drove the target species to extinction?
If the conditions that lead to the extinction persist, re-creating an extinct species from ancient DNA would be wasted money. The re-created creature could not survive in the wild, which would make it just a curiosity in a zoo. Not much different than a skeleton in a museum, except that there would be ethical problems and costs when dealing with a live mammalian predator.
Even if the reasons that lead to extinction could be removed, there comes the problem of creating a population that have sufficient genetic diversity.
If the re-creation happens from the DNA of one or few frozen carcasses, there would not be enough of genetic variation to create a viable population.
If the problem of genetic diversity could be solved in the re-creation phase, the population would need sufficient habitat to maintain hundreds of individuals. Putting sabertooths or mammoths in an environment where humans live is a recipe for serious problems. Here (Finland), we have social problems, hot arguing and lawsuits in trying to maintain a minimum population of 500 wolves within a mainly sparsely inhabited area of >200 000 km2. Problems with sabertooths or mammoths would be radically worse. In practice, human settlements would have to be removed from the area or isolated with sufficient fences or other protection. Who could afford to establish a reservate of 100’000 km2 just for the re-created species, especially if the area and ecosystems would need manipulation to become suitable for the species?
Putting the billions needed for such a project to saving endangered populations would be a much better alternative.
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It’s an unfortunate fact that our species has somewhat disconnected priorities from what the actual issues at hand are. We have the unique position of being able to achieve foresight and looking ahead at what is to come; theoretically, our species should be able to face anything that should come our way. Yet, presidential elections focus more on short-term satisfaction rather than longevity: get rid of regulations to temporarily boost economic growth, cut down native forest to achieve “independence,” sell off federal land to build more housing, etc. The unfortunate thing is that this just seems like a small taste of the reality we face with society’s priorities. Instead of using those billions of dollars to fund water-infrastructure in Africa or protecting endangered species that still survive, we instead try to play God and bring dead things back to life.
I’ve heard it said to be a rope, as in a camel hair rope. Makes more sense to me than the people who talk of getting a camel through the eye of a needle gate.
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One strategy Is to ask how much they would be willing to wager on such claims. This is hard to pull off if you are not prepared to answer the obvious questions before they can ask:
- How much would you be willing to wager this claim is true?
- The wager is to be adjudicated by a knowledgeable profession, in this case a museum director or staff paleontologist.
- The loser can make a donation to the museum in payment.
The point is not to make a real wager, which hardly ever works out, but to show how little faith they have in their own claims. Would they bet $50? $5? … 50 cents? You need to be prepared to make that wager in earnest for this to be effective.
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Both are built on top of fossils beds in that corner of Kentucky.
More: there [are] more than just one “saber tooth” cat or other creatures with dagger-like teeth:
- Smilodon
- Homotherium
- Machairodus
- Nimravids
- Thylacosmilids
- Machaeroides
Parallel evolution at work.
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It was a long time ago when I saw this video of a bunch of people whose guru told them that their eyesight would improve if they looked directly at the sun. The group actually looked at the sun, directly, just as the guru said they should. I don’t know what happened after that as the video ends at the point when all of them are looking directly at the sun.
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Personally, I think dinosaurs are not important enough for the theory of evolution by natural selection to both faking. It would make more sense to fake early human fossils or fossils of the earliest life on Earth.
Interestingly, there was a modern geocentrist website up in 2007-2008 that has since been taken down (probably for the better) titled earthisnotmoving.org. Modern geocentrism seems to have run out of steam where you will still encounter flat earthers. My hypothesis is that flat earthism has greater shock value so it is more attractive to trolls, plus it is more consistent. You are accepting more science as a given if you accept geocentrism, where you reject all of it if you are a flat earther. Most anti-science folks, however, reject science more for trust or emotional reasons, so probably the best way to address the problem is simply building trust between scientists and non-scientists. This has been done successfully with anti-vaxxers getting vaccinated after they gained the trust of doctors.
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If I were on the “evolution faking committee” I would agree too. However, such a committee doesn’t exist, but more importantly, wider society doesn’t seem to care as much about earlier fossils as they do dinosaurs. It’s kinda like how, through whatever means, art just assumes the Moon is a hallow crescent that you can see stars through, until you actually realize that the Moon is a solid celestial body much like a planet (I really like the idea that the Earth-Moon system is almost like a binary planet system). However, besides people who care a lot about astronomy or science, many people may continue to view the Moon has a giant crescent in the sky, and thus that view could become the underlying lens for certain arguments (which is why this video below has an information hazard warning in the intro because of how many people hold the giant crescent view of the Moon).
Similarly, the wider public doesn’t ponder the earliest fish or plants on Earth. The dinosaurs are big and cool, and thus most of the public’s attention gets funneled toward these creatures. Much like people may forget exactly what the Moon is, people simply forget something comes before the dinosaurs, and thus why these theories are built as such.
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Yes. I debated with one flat earther and she lifted up the claim that you can see stars through the moon, as the flags of some countries picture. Easy to refute, just by looking at the moon with bare eyes, binoculars or telescope.
It is amazing how even university-educated people may believe bizarre conspiracy claims that could be easily debunked by using your own senses. No wonder that conspiracy claims that are not as easily refuted stay alive and continue circulating in the wonderful(?) world of internet.
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I really enjoyed the X files series.
Whatever happened to playing a hunch Scully? The element of surprise, random acts of unpredictability? If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen, expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that can’t be programmed, categorized or easily referenced ~ Agent Fox Mulder to Agent Dana Scully
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More accurately, they superficially modified wolves and called the results dire wolves.
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Parallel evolution? Probably more a case of parallel design, I’d say.
Exactly what I alluded to when I said “brought back.”
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