Ben Madilynn
When a Mississippi Delta couple went to spend time on the Mississippi River recently, they expected to find fossils from long-extinct animals. After all, they find them all the time.
However, what they didn’t expect to find was a fossilized jaw bone from a giant Ice Age cat.
Sherry Couey of Rosedale grew up with a father who collected fossils along the river and she has been following in his footsteps as long as she can remember.
“I’ve been doing this since I was able to walk with my daddy,” Couey said. “It’s unreal what you find.”
In recent years, she has been sharing her passion for hunting fossils with fianceĢJo-Jo Aguzzi of Cleveland, Mississippi.
“We’ve been fossil hunting pretty strong for the last two summers, particularly when the river was low,” Aguzzi said. “We’ve found mammoth teeth, mastodon teeth, we’ve got tusks. I found a musk ox skull, which is pretty rare.”
Mississippi fossil hunter finds rare saber-toothed cat jaw
Last month, Couey and Aguzzi were on the river doing what they love to do and Couey came across something very unexpected.
“It was half-buried,” Couey said. “It was barely poking up. I just thought it was bone.”
When she picked it up, Aguzzi immediately knew what it was, or at least he thought he did.
“When she found it, I knew it was a cat,” Aguzzi said. “I told her she found an American lion”
That would have been an unusual find. American lions became extinct about 11,000 years ago and were first documented from a jaw bone found near Natchez in the 1830s. Since, only a handful of lion jaw bones have been found in Mississippi.
However, paleontologist George Phillips of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science identified it as a jaw from a saber-toothed cat.
That made the discovery excessively rare in Mississippi. Phillips said only about a dozen fossilized parts of saber-toothed cats have been found in Mississippi and Couey’s find was the first jaw to be documented in the state.
“It was unbelievable, to be honest,” Couey said. “To actually have a saber-tooth, it was unbelievable for us.”
More:Mississippi man finds bone from ice age apex predator, saber-toothed tiger
A specialized Ice Age killer
Saber-toothed cats are iconic of the last Ice Age and were well-developed for killing prey. Phillips said they were powerful and had strong jaw, neck and shoulder muscles.
There were the canine teeth. Phillips said they were roughly the size of a banana with a total length of about 10 1/2 inches. About five inches of that extended beyond the gum line.
“It’s a dagger,” Phillips said.
And those daggers along with powerful muscles combined into a specialized hunter. Phillips said the theory on how the large teeth were used that he believes is they were used to inflict a single, fatal bite to soft tissue on some of the large herbivores of the time. Then, the cat would wait for the animal to die rather than risk damaging a tooth with multiple bites and a struggle.
The cats were also quite large and rival the size of the largest cats known while dwarfing others.
‘It was huge.’Mississippi man finds rare mammoth tusk, first in the state
How big were saber-toothed cats compared to others?
Saber-toothed cats were huge animals and apex predators. They have been estimated to weigh up to 620 pounds. But how do they compare to other large cats?
And finding remains of such a giant predator is the highlight of the couple’s fossil-hunting careers despite all they’ve found.
“The saber-tooth jaw tops them all,” Aguzzi said.
Do you have a story idea? Contact Brian Broom at 601-961-7225 or bbroom@gannett.com.
