Tito’s Friend

As I mentioned yesterday, my old dog Tito has been having night terrors. The medication he’s on takes time to build up in his system, but last night was another tough one. It’s hard watching your old friend in difficulty when nothing you do seems to help. The vet warned me about this because the tranquilizers I had been giving him can’t be administered as the new medication takes hold. During the day he still enjoys the snorts and walks, and his eyes are still bright and clear, so I’m not ready to love him enough to let him go. It hasn’t come to that yet.

Back when I first started thinking about Olduvai in book form I painted this piece in acrylic on illustration board. Tito is only 9 here and still in possession of the beautiful demarcation across his chest that he lost (along with life number 5) on a horseshoe stake buried in snow. The picture is a little grainy and not as clean as the art in my earlier posts, but I had only an old low resolution scan to work with. For comparison, Tito is 26 inches at the shoulder.

For a slightly larger if somewhat fuzzy image click here

Tito’s friend here is the North American species of scimitar cat, Homotherium serum. Most people are familiar with the classic saber-tooth, Smilodon, the “tiger” of La Brea Tar Pits fame, but relatively few know of this unusual cat. As you can see, Homotherium (literally “man’s beast” because the first fossils of the European species were found in association with human remains and artifacts – it’s not clear who was eating who) had a markedly different body type from most felids. The head was held high on the long, strong neck. The forelegs were elongated, while the hind quarters were rather squat with feet perhaps partially plantigrade.

While the 9 inch (+) daggers of Smilodon were somewhat laterally flattened, the 5 inch canines of Homotherium were razor-sharp blades, serrated both front and back. These were not teeth for holding on to struggling prey animals. Suffocating or throttling or crushing a victim was not the scimitar cat’s MO. This was a very fast felid of open country with acceleration and agility. The most likely form of attack would have been a lightning fast slash producing a profusely bleeding wound. It would have been awfully tough to watch on Animal Planet, but allowed Homotherium to strike prey as large as not-so-young mammoths. In a cave in Texas, the bones of both adult scimitar cats and cubs have been found in association with a large number of (mostly juvenile) mammoth and mastodon teeth.

I apologize for jumping around so. Some day I’ll have enough images to put them in some sort of order as to time and location and make better connections. But then again, I guess a blog is supposed to be forever a work in progress.