Back during the tardy Miocene period , about 9 million years ago , two bombastic and ferocious piranha shared the same ecological niche . The two metal money , the leopard - sized sabre - toothed African tea ( Promegantereon ogygia ) and the much larger , lion - sized bear dog ( Machairodus aphanistus ) , somehow managed to avoid each other and share the resourcefulness of the same woodland habitat . take care to find out how they achieved this apparent harmoniousness , a team of palaeontologist take up a close look at their fossilise clay .
To do so , a collaborative research team from the University of Michigan and the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid conduct a serial publication of tests in which static atomic number 6 isotypes of the animals ’ teeth were analyzed , bring home the bacon them with a glimpse into their eating habits . The investigator , a squad direct by Soledad Domingo , used a standard dentist ’s drill to extract samples from well-nigh 70 specimens that lived at the time , including 42 herbivore and 27 sabre - toothed Caterpillar and bear dogs . The cadaver were found in geological pit near Madrid , Spain .
Once the researchers keep apart the carbon copy from the tooth enamel , they used a mass spectrometer to measure the various organic elements present in the teeth ( different animals will leave dissimilar isotropic signatures bet on what they wipe out ) . Once the various compounds were mapped according to mintage , the researcher could start to determine who was eating what .
What they give away was that the saber - tooth African tea and bear dog did in fact hunt the same quarry — but that the quarry were occupying slightly different portions of habitat ( they were able-bodied to find out this by count at the different sort of plants that the herbivore were eat ) .
ground on this , the investigator ascertain that the swelled computerized tomography could deflect the turgid bear wiener by using the ample tree deal to hold back themselves while hunt for such thing as horses and wild wild boar . The bear dog , on the other hand , in accession to preying on the same fauna , also in all probability hunted antelope in more subject areas that overlapped with the cat ’ territory , just more or less separated . This way , the two animate being could avoid unpleasant encounter with each other — even if there was some overlap in their target .
therefore , these two sympatric marauder animals could inhabit the same geographical area and sectionalisation resources accordingly .
The entirestudycan be read at Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Top iomage : Mauricio Antón . Bear dogvia .
EvolutionPaleontologyScience
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