The naming of many saber-toothed species—the most famous being the genus Smilodon, or the saber-toothed cat—sounds like a bit of a macabre joke. The pearly grins of these prehistoric predators might have been the last sight of any creatures that got close enough to appreciate them. But not all saber-toothed things were aggressively predatory. Some, like the marsupial Thylacosmilus atrox, may have occupied a different niche. As a new study published in the journal PeerJ reports, the pouched, cat-resembling creature may have been more of a scavenger, carefully slicing already-dead…
