Crossword-Solution: SABRETOOTH 10 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 15

The earlier ones were contemporaries of the hippopotamus and of not only the lion but the sabretooth.

Doubtless animals in full vigor were more apt to work themselves free at the moment when they found they were caught in the tar; and, moreover, a wolf or sabretooth which was weakened by age or by wounds received in encounter with its rivals, or with some formidable quarry, and which therefore found its usual prey difficult to catch, would be apt to hang around places where carcasses, or living creatures still feebly struggling, offered themselves to ravenous appetites.

The sabretooth cats, like the true cats, had gone through an immensely long period of developmental history in North America, although they did not appear here as early as the little camels and horses.

Far back across the ages, at or just after the close of the Eocene--the "dawn age" of mammalian life--certain moderate-sized or small cat-like creatures existed on this continent, doubtless ancestral to the sabretooth, but so generalized in type that they display close affinities with the true cats, and even on certain points with the primitive dog creatures of the time.

Slowly, slowly, while the surface of the world thus changed, and through innumerable reaches of time, the sabretooth cats and true cats developed along many different lines in both the Old World and the New.