Return to Abode: Sciencewatch! PageIn Elfquest, the Pinis have created an earth-like world and, for the time period of the initial quest, populated it with animals similar to those of the prehistoric, Pleistocene earth. It is a backdrop familiar to readers who have seen museum dioramas or enjoyed fiction about cave-dwelling humans. Woolly mammoths, giant sloths and sabre-toothed tigers form a fauna we understand. But just how likely is this set of creatures? Woolly mammoths seem inevitable in ice-age times-there are several existing species of elephant, and it is easy to imagine how they might gain or lose a coat of fur. There are several varieties of sloth as well, and it's no great leap to change size.
The longtooth of the World of Two Moons might present more of a puzzle. Everyone is familiar with Smilodon of the La Brea Tar Pits here on earth, which lived twelve thousand to three million years ago. But most people have no way to judge how "likely" a sabre-toothed feline is. Do those super-long canine teeth mark a freak, like the Irish Elk with its 12-foot wide antlers or the peacock with its magnificent tail spread, evolving once on earth and never again? Or is the sabre-toothed form a "likely" type, as the wolf form must surely be? Earth has produced not only the wolf family of the northern hemisphere, but also the marsupial "Tasmanian wolf", which is a striking example of convergent evolution. The ecological niche to which wolves have adapted produces a body with certain characteristics, and the body type appears multiple times in the catalog of earth's creatures.
What about the longtooth? It's a strange-looking creature to modern earthlings. But a glance through the fossil record shows that sabretoothed predators evolved many times throughout earth's history. The first recorded sabretooth was Machaeroides, which lived during the Eocene period fifty million years before Smilodon. This was not a member of the cat family, but of the extinct order Creodonta. There were marsupial sabretooths as well, including Thylacosmilus in the Pliocene/Pleistocene, twelve to three million years ago. There was a large family of carnivores, called the nimravids, now all extinct, which produced several sabretoothed forms in the Oligocene era, thirty-six million years ago. And Smilodon was not the only species of true cat to be well-endowed in the canine teeth. Eusmilus of the Oligocene and Machairodus of the Pliocene are two others.
So, the longtooth seems to be a creature which is not only likely, but inevitable when the environment will support a predator of that size. Many of the earthly "longtooth" species existed at the same time, which means our elves might have to deal with multiple types of longtooth! In fact, paleontologists recognize two different basic body types in our fossil record: "scimitar-toothed" varieties, about the size and build of a modern tiger or leopard, possessing bladelike canines; and "dirk-toothed" varieties, much more powerfully-built, with shorter legs and very long, daggerlike canines. Some of the dirk-toothed species had flanges on the lower jaw, which served as a kind of sheath for the long canine teeth. By the way, there is debate over how the extended canines were used in hunting. The typical feline killing action of a bite to the top of the neck, between the vertebrae, is likely to break the elongated tooth. The long teeth may instead have been used like Cutter's sword to slash at the prey's underbelly or the front of the neck.
References:Elfquest, its logos, characters, situations, all related indicia, and their distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 1999 linda_tam@alumni.hmc.edu
Last updated on October 28, 1999.
Return to Abode: Sciencewatch! Page