Shortly after excavators began blasting into the ground to prepare the way for construction of a new 28-story bank building in downtown Nashville two years ago, a sharp-eyed workman spotted something strange in the limestone debris—an ivory-colored, banana-shaped object that looked like a miniature elephant tusk. Bank officials, hearing of the odd discovery, quickly called in an amateur archaeologist, Robert Ferguson, who immediately recognized the find. It was a fossilized fang from a saber-toothed tiger, an extinct, ferocious-looking creature that once stalked wide areas of the Americas.
About the size of a modern lion, the sabertooth, or Smilodon (from the Greek words for "knife" and "tooth"), had powerful jaws equipped with two long fangs that it could use like daggers to rip into large prey, notably the poky, plant-eating mastodons that also inhabited the American continent. When the elephant-like mastodons began to die out, the sabertooth's days were also numbered. Slower afoot than modern tigers and possessed of a smaller brain, the sabertooth could not keep up with speedier prey that might have assured its survival. Indeed, archaeological dating of the remains of sabertooths found in Los Angeles' Rancho La Brea tar pits suggests that the last sabertooths vanished from North America about 13,000 years ago.
Intriguing Age. Sympathetic to the intense interest of scientists, officials of Nashville's First American National Bank revised plans for the foundation of the building so that the tiger's natural tomb (actually a large underground cavern) would be left intact while construction continued around it. The bank's gesture quickly paid dividends. A team of amateur diggers, led by Ferguson and Anthropologist Ronald Spores of Vanderbilt University, found the bulk of the remaining pieces of the tiger's skeleton as well as more fossils, including the bones of several other extinct creatures apparently killed and dragged into the cavern by the tiger: a mastodon, an ancient horse, a long-nosed piglike creature called a peccary and a prehistoric bison. In addition, they discovered four relatively recent human remains—probably Indians of the Woodland Period (1000 B.C.-1500 A.D.). Distinguished by the artificial slope of their foreheads, a cosmetic effect achieved by the binding of their skulls during childhood, the Indians lived in the area 2,000 years ago and apparently used the cavern as a burial site.
But the most significant find remains the sabertooth. Stretching more than six feet from fangs to tail, the Nashville cat is one of the largest ever found. It is also remarkably well preserved; 70% of the animal's bones were recovered, most of them clustered together. Most intriguing of all is their age. Carbon 14 dating, arranged by Paleontologist John Guilday of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum, suggests that the remains of the Nashville sabertooth are a mere 9,500 years old. That indicates not only that sabertooths lived several thousand years longer than generally believed, but that they may well have coexisted with—and perhaps were even hunted by—the early Americans who are believed to have crossed over from Asia at least 12,000 years ago via the land bridge that once existed at the site of the present Bering Strait.