Peccaries and sabertooths

I spent my spring break down in Florida--not at the beach, but at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. The draw? Sabertooths. My colleagues and I have long been interested in the behavior of these large cats, largely because they shared the landscape with the early hominins that we study at places like Olduvai Gorge. With the exception of the La Brea Tarpits in California, there is no better place in the world than Florida to uncover evidence for sabertooths. The state's karstic landscape contains an almost unrivaled collection of well-preserved Pleistocene fossil assemblages, many of which include the skeletal remains of sabertooths. One of these cats, Xenosmilus hodsonae, lived in Florida between about 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago. A nearly complete skeleton, and the species' holotype, was found a few miles west of Gainesville at a site called Haile 21A. We visited the museum's Florida Fossil exhibit to see a cast of the skeleton.

Mounted skeletons in the main hall of the Florida Fossils exhibit. The
Xenosmilus skeleton is just right of center.

Found alongside this important fossil, inside an ancient sinkhole, was a large collection of extinct peccaries. We are interested in this assemblage because it may teach us a great deal about sabertooth feeding behavior. Our working hypothesis is that the peccaries were victims of predation and that Haile 21A itself represents a Xenosmilus den. The fossil assemblage was excavated in the early 1980s and is now housed and curated by the Vertebrate Paleontology section of the Department of Natural History in Dickinson Hall. The collection is expertly managed by Richard Hulbert, Jr., who is one of the leading authorities on the vertebrate paleontology of Florida and a genuinely nice person.

Collections room of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology in Dickinson
Hall.

My colleagues Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo, Lucía Cobo Sanchez, Enrique Baquedano, and I were given access not only to the fossil collection, but a fully functional lab, a photography rig, and comparative skeletal material.

Our assigned lab space in the Vertebrate Paleontology
Section. 

We spent about eight hours a day for the past week looking through ~1,600 peccary specimens. Now, its time to analyze the data, so stay tuned...