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“Ugly” fossil places extinct saber-toothed cat on Texas coast - EurekAlert


This fossil looks like a lumpy, rounded rock with a couple of exposed teeth that are a little worse for wear, having been submerged and tumbled along the floor of the Gulf of Mexico for thousands of years before washing up on a beach. But when it was X-rayed at the Jackson School’s University of Texas Computed Tomography Lab, doctoral student John Moretti saw there was more to the fossil that met the eye: a hidden canine tooth that had not yet erupted from the jaw bone. It was just what Moretti needed to identify the fossil as belonging to a Homotherium, a genus of large cat that roamed much of the Earth for millions of years.

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