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Skeletal trauma reflects hunting behaviour in extinct sabre-tooth cats and dire wolves

Abstract

Skeletal-injury frequency and distribution are likely to reflect hunting behaviour in predatory vertebrates and might therefore differ between species with distinct hunting modes. Two Pleistocene predators from the Rancho La Brea asphalt seeps, the sabre-tooth cat, Smilodon fatalis, and dire wolf, Canis dirus, represent ambush and pursuit predators, respectively. On the basis of a collection of over 1,900 pathological elements, the frequency of traumatic injury across skeletal elements in these two species was calculated. Here we show that the frequency of trauma in the sabre-tooth cat exceeds that of the dire wolf (4.3% compared to 2.8%), implying that the killing behaviour of S. fatalis entailed greater risk of injury. The distribution of traumatic injuries also differed between the two species. S. fatalis, an ambush predator, was injured more often than expected across the lumbar vertebrae and shoulders whereas C. dirus, a pursuit predator, had higher than expected levels of injury in the limbs and cervical vertebrae. Spatial analysis was used to quantify differences in the distribution of putative hunting injuries. Analysis of injury locations discriminated true hotspots from injury-dense areas and facilitated interpretation of predatory behaviour, demonstrating the use of spatial analyses in the study of vertebrate behaviour and evolution. These results suggest that differences in trauma distribution reflect distinct hazards of each species’ hunting mode.

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Figure 1: Examples of common chronic pathologies in C. dirus and S. fatalis.
Figure 2: Observed and expected counts of pathological elements by anatomical region in S. fatalis and C. dirus.
Figure 3: Distribution of traumatic and chronic pathology centroids across S. fatalis and C. dirus skeletal base maps.
Figure 4: Density/heat map depictions of traumatic and chronic pathology centroids across a S. fatalis and C. dirus hindlimb.

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Acknowledgements

F. Heald spent two decades analysing pathologies prior to his death in 2000, and for this we are grateful. We thank A. Farrell, G. Takeuchi and S. Cox of the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum for their help. J. Parkinson, M. Shin and A. Kochapu provided helpful advice on methods. For comments on the paper, we thank the Van Valkenburgh laboratory. J. Keller, T. Galea and K. Keeley helped create the GIS dataset. This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant SGP-1237928.

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B.V.V. conceived the project; C.B. conceived and carried out the GIS analysis; B.V.V., C.B. and M.B. designed the collections research; C.A.S. diagnosed and curated the pathology specimens; C.B. and M.B. collected pathology type and location data, B.V.V. and C.B. wrote the paper. All authors gave final approval for publication.

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Correspondence to Caitlin Brown.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Supplementary Methods; Supplementary Tables 1–5; Supplementary Figures 1,2 (PDF 663 kb)

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Brown, C., Balisi, M., Shaw, C. et al. Skeletal trauma reflects hunting behaviour in extinct sabre-tooth cats and dire wolves. Nat Ecol Evol 1, 0131 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0131

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