Dmanisi's Big, Bad Cheetah
01.09.11
Subsume a shoulder blade, a humerus, a radius, an ulna, and several bones of the paw, perfectly representing the majority of the cat’s forelimb.
The association of these bones, or whether they came from a separate individual, is not explained in the paper, but Hemmer and colleagues use them to attain up with a body mass estimate for the big, bad cheetah. Based upon the relationship between one of the paw bones – a metacarpal – and confederation size, the researchers produced a body mass guess of about 220 lbs (although it should be remembered that this is a rough figure that is only a ballpark clue of the animal’s size). It’s tough extrapolating the mass of the muscle, viscera, and all the other bones from a negligible portion of bone.
Nevertheless, the size of the bones alone indicate that the Dmanisi cheetah was a monstrous cat, and, using the body mass estimate, Hemmer and co-authors attempted to arise up with an idea of how much food the carnivore would have taken down. Based upon the behavior and rook preferences of modern cheetahs, the researchers propose that the Dmanisi cheetah would have run down calves and foals of brawny herbivores, specializing on prey weighing around 100 lbs or so. Assuming that the obsolete cheetah was as successful at hunting as the living species, the cat is estimated to have acquired a aggregate of over 16,500 lbs of prey a year. That’s a lot of meat, and there would have undoubtedly been leftovers. “This would have accomplished the Dmanisi cat to take its place as the top carcass producer within the carnivore community,” Hemmer and co-authors speculate, and so the denial of some kills to other meat-eaters in the neighborhood would have been tolerable. That may have been decent as well. Again citing the behavior of modern-day cheetahs, the scientists delineate that cheetahs are fresh-meat specialists and leave appreciable parts of larger kills to go to waste.
Source: Wired News