First sabre-toothed cat fossil in Canada found in Medicine Hat

Ashley Reynolds, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, came across the fossil in the Royal Ontario Museum while doing research on the Smilodon.

“I just happened to be looking through the drawers that we have at the Royal Ontario Museum and came across these little packages of bone that said they belonged to Smilodon, which to my knowledge had never been found in Canada before,” she said during a video conference call from Toronto on Friday.

“So, I was intrigued and a little skeptical, so we decided to look into it further, and it turns out some of those identifications were correct.”

Ashley Reynolds holds the Smilodon fatalis metacarpal from Medicine Hat, AB. On the table are a S. fatalis skull and canine tooth from Peru. Credit: Danielle Dufault © Royal Ontario Museum

The study was published Friday in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences.

The fossil of the Smilodon was discovered west of the city limits by a team from the University of Toronto in the late 1960s. Along with other fossils discovered during the dig, they were donated to the museum, but no further research had been done on them until recently.

The fragment of Smilodon discovered was a small bone in its paw. Paleontologists also discovered whats believed to be a bone from a cave lion, which could potentially be the most southerly recorded record of the animal. Bones from the American lion, and what is believed to be a bobcat or a lynx, were also discovered.

The Smilodon, which went extinct 11,000 years ago, hunted camels, horses, and giant ground sloths. Multiple fossils were found in the La Brea Tar Pits in California, as well as tar pits in Peru, making this discovery particularly significant.

Smilodon fatalis metacarpal from Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Credit: Danielle Dufault © Royal Ontario Museum

“The furthest north we had ever found the species was in Idaho, which is 1,000 kilometres south of Medicine Hat,” Reynolds said.

“Because we have this information, we can learn more about the ecosystems that were present in Alberta during the last Ice Age.”

François Therrien, the curator of dinosaur palaeoecology with the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, says Medicine Hat and Redcliff were popular with paleontologists during the 1960s and 1970s, saying in addition to dinosaur fossils, Ice Age fossils were also located in the region.

He says the recent discovery of the Smilodon could bring renewed interest to the area.

“Now that they see the material that was collected back in the 1960s and 70s has been rediscovered -so to speak- in museum collections, I think in the years to come, it’s going to draw attention and a lot of paleontologists are going to go back to Medicine Hat and going to venture and see if there is new material that has been eroded since the 1980s, if there is new material at the surface,” he said.

Reynolds, who was in the area in July trying to locate the area the Smilodon was found, plans to come back to Medicine Hat in the future.

“We have found more evidence that are still some fossils in the area,” she said. “No Smilodon yet, but we’re hoping if we can figure out the exact best place to look is, we can find more.”

Illustration of Smilodon fatalis Credit: by palaeoartist Henry Sharpe

by Charles Lefebvre

First sabre-toothed cat fossil in Canada found in Medicine Hat

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