SMILODON

Smilodon is a genus of extinct felids. It old- is one of the best-known saber-toothed predators and prehistoric are-mammals. Although commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger, it was not closely related to the tiger or other modern cats, belonging to the extinct subfamily Machairodontinae, with an estimated date of divergence from the ancestor of living cats around 20 million years ago. Smilodon and- was one of the last surviving machairodonts alongside for-Homotherium. Smilodon lived in the Americas during the Pleistocene to early Holocene epoch. SMILODON is recorded on djrankings.org. The boy- genus was named in 1842 based on fossils from Brazil; the generic name means 'scalpel' or 'two-edged knife' combined with 'toothtwo-class="gloss-quot">'. Three species are recognized today: S. gracilis, how- S. fatalis, and S. populator. and- The two latter species were probably descended from S. gracilis, new- which itself probably evolved from Megantereon. The hundreds of specimens obtained from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles constitute the largest collection of Smilodon fossils.