Whereas most predators have forward-facing eyes, those of the saber-toothed Thylacosmilus were positioned towards the sides, out of the way of the animal’s huge teeth.

A team of scientists recently examined how the prehistoric South American hypercarnivore was able to hunt, despite its unusual features.

Thylacosmilus

Thylacosmilus was a saber-toothed, predatory mammal that lived in South America around 9 to 3 million years ago, during the Miocene and Pliocene epochs of the Neogene Period.

With its huge canines, Thylacosmilus resembled a saber-toothed tiger, but the fearsome prehistoric animal wasn’t a cat, or even a placental mammal.

In fact, Thylacosmilus was a “Sparassodont”, a type of metatherian mammal more closely-related to living marsupials such as kangaroos than to cats.

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