Diet and hunting

Restoration of Smilodon populator
Smilodon probably preyed on a wide variety of large game including bison, deer, American camels, horses and ground sloths. As it is known for the saber-toothed cat Homotherium, Smilodon might have killed also juvenile mastodons and mammoths. The La Brea tar pits in California trapped hundreds of Smilodon in the tar, possibly as they tried to feed on mammoths already trapped. The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has many of their complete skeletons.
Modern big cats kill mainly by crushing the windpipe of their victims, which may take a few minutes. Smilodon’s jaw muscles were probably too weak for this and its long canines and fragile skull would have been vulnerable to snapping in a prolonged struggle or when biting a running prey. Research in 2007 concluded that Smilodon more probably used its great upper-body strength to wrestle prey to the ground, where its long canines could deliver a deep stabbing bite to the throat which would generally cut through the jugular vein and / or the trachea and thus kill the prey very quickly. The leaders of this study also commented to scientific journalists that this technique may have made Smilodon a more efficient killer of large prey than modern lions or tigers, but also made it more dependent on the supply of large animals. This highly-specialized hunting style may have contributed to its extinction, as Smilodon’s cumbersome build and over-sized canines would have made it less efficient at killing smaller, faster prey if the ecosystem changed for any reason.
Research upon which African carnivores response to playback of animals in distress has been used to analyse the finds of animal species and their numbers at the La Brea Tar Pits. Such playbacks find animal distress calls such as would come from animal trapped in the tar pit would attract pack hunters such as lions and spotted hyenas, not lone hunters . Given the carnivores found at tar pits were predominately Smilodon and the social dire wolf, this suggests that the former like the later was also a social animal. One expert, who found the study convincing, further speculated that if that was the case, then Smilodon's exaggerated canine teeth might have been used more for social or sexual signaling than hunting. However, the lack of sexual dimorphism in the canine teeth refutes this proposal

smilodon

Smilodon became extinct around 10,000 BC, a time which saw the extinction of many other large herbivorous and carnivorous mammals.
Prehistoric humans, who reached North America at the end of the Ice age, are often viewed as responsible for this extinction wave. Others have suggested that the end of the ice age caused the extinction. As the ice age ended there would have been shrinking environments and changing vegetation patterns. Extensive grasslands, with different types of grasses, and isolated forests replaced healthy mixes of forests and grasslands. The summer and winter both became more extreme and North America began to dry out or began to be covered in snow, thus denying food sources for mammoths and in turn Smilodon. However, this hypothesis does not explain how Smilodon and its ancestors successfully survived many previous interglacials.

Smilodon was the largest saber-toothed cat (or saber-toothed tiger). It was a fierce predator about 4-5 feet (1.2-1.5 m) long and 3 feet (0.9 m) tall. It weighed about 440 lbs (200 kg). It was a bit smaller than a modern-day lion, but much heavier.It had relatively short legs and a short, bobbed tail. Its front legs were especially powerful. Its body was adapted for springing onto prey, but it was not a very fast runner.During the last Ice Age, there were many large, interesting mammals, like the saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, mastodons, and mammoths. These animals have long since gone extinct and are known mostly from fossils, frozen, mummified carcasses, and from ancient cave drawings. The pressures of a major climate change probably led to their extinction; human hunting may have made their situation even worse.

They are called "sabre-toothed" for the extreme length of their maxillary canines. Despite the colloquial name of "saber-toothed tiger", Smilodon is not a tiger. Tigers belong to the the subfamily Pantherinae.

Smilodon, often called saber-toothed cat or saber-toothed tiger, is an extinct genus of the subfamily machairodontine saber-toothed cats endemic to North America and South America living from the Early Pleistocene through Lujanian stage of the Pleistocene epoch (1.8 mya—10,000 years ago), existing for approximately 1.790 million years.