ArticleCommunications biology2023
Seeing through the eyes of the sabertooth Thylacosmilus atrox (Metatheria, Sparassodonta).
Article in Communications biology, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bending performance changes during prolonged canine eruption in saber-toothed carnivores: A case study of Smilodon fatalis.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Article
- Who was the real sabertooth predator: Thylacosmilus or Thylacoleo?Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Article
- Comparing cranial biomechanics between Barbourofelis fricki and Smilodon fatalis: Is there a universal killing-bite among saber-toothed predators?Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Article
- Hypercanines: Not just for sabertooths.Anatomical record (Hoboken, N.J. : 2007) · 2025Review
- Evolutionary ecomorphology for the twenty-first century: examples from mammalian carnivores.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The evolution of mammalian vision is difficult to study because the actual receptor organs-the eyes-are not preserved in the fossil record. Orbital orientation and size are the traditional proxies for inferring aspects of ocular function, such as stereoscopy. Adaptations for good stereopsis have evolved in living predaceous mammals, and it is reasonable to infer that fossil representatives would follow the same pattern. This applies to the sparassodonts, an extinct group of South American hypercarnivores related to marsupials, with one exception. In the sabertooth Thylacosmilus atrox, the bony orbits were notably divergent, like those of a cow or a horse, and thus radically differing from conditions in any other known mammalian predator. Orbital convergence alone, however, does not determine presence of stereopsis; frontation and verticality of the orbits also play a role. We show that the orbits of Thylacosmilus were frontated and verticalized in a way that favored some degree of stereopsis and compensated for limited convergence in orbital orientation. The forcing function behind these morphological tradeoffs was the extraordinary growth of its rootless canines, which affected skull shape in Thylacosmilus in numerous ways, including relative orbital displacement.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.