Sabertooth

Foreword

xi F Foreword For the past thirty-five years I have had the privilege of spending time in the company of Africa’s charismatic big cats–the lions, leopards, and cheetahs that my wife, Angie, and I have come to know as individuals, recording their lives in words, drawings, and photographs in the Masai Mara in Kenya, the northern extension of Tanzania’s great Serengeti National Park. The Mara-Serengeti is an ancient land: there are rocks at the heart of the Serengeti that are more than three billion years old. Standing on a hilltop overlooking the vastness of the Serengeti’s short-grass plains during the rainy season, you can witness a Pleistocene vision, the land awash with animals. Hundreds of thousands of wildebeest and zebras, tens of thousands of gazelles, and hundreds of elands and ostriches share the mineral rich grasslands. Dotted among them you can pick out the sloping backs and powerful forequarters of spotted hyenas as they amble along, the herds parting and closing again as the predators pass through or begin to hunt. Prides of lions rest up in the shade of granite outcrops known as kopjes that emerge like castles from a sea of grass. Somewhere a leopard lies recumbent along the wide limb of a giant fig tree, while a cheetah perches sphinx-like on a termite mound, looking for a gazelle fawn to chase down. This is the last place on earth where you can see scenes of such abundance, yet it’s only a fragment of our planet’s past animal glories. The fossil record allows us a glimpse of other times and other creatures equally as fascinating and awe inspiring as anything seen today, times when there were many more members of the cat family searching for prey among wild landscapes across the globe. We are mesmerized by predators. There is a mixture of awe and fear, a reminder at some primal level of the time 2 million years ago when our ancestors emerged from the forest edges into the sunlight of the African savannahs, scavenging and killing prey for themselves. To do this they had to find ways of competing with the great cats and hyenas of that epoch . Little wonder, then, that we fear the large predators for their power while admiring them for their strength and courage. This ambiguous relationship between hunter and hunted is echoed in the hauntingly beautiful cave art of Lascaux and Chauvet in Europe–an artistic tradition that Mauricio Antón so admirably continues with the artwork in his fascinating and informative Sabertooth. It takes a skilled observer with imagination to bring the past to life. xii Foreword Who hasn’t felt a thrill and fascination at the mention of sabertooths? Cartographers of ancient times inscribed “here be dragons” on early maps, conjuring up vivid images of giant reptiles living deep in the heart of Africa, in the same way that sabertooth tigers (as they were sometimes referred to) were the highlight of the Boys Own magazines and comics of my childhood. Something for youngsters to fantasize about; ripping adventures played out in the wilds of Africa and beyond. I first came across Mauricio Antón’s eye-catching draftsmanship in a copy of his The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives when Angie and I were researching a series of books on Africa’s big cats to accompany the popular television series Big Cat Diary. Mauricio’s beautifully crafted drawings and paintings allowed us to step back in time to a very different era. If a love of the African savannahs has driven our own passion for wilderness and adventure, then imagine the thrill of taking a safari through the Pleistocence landscape of a million years ago–or further back still, to the Miocene of 20 million years ago that heralded the advent of the extinct relatives of our modern big cats. The world of fossils and prehistoric life must by its very nature remain part of our imagination–something ancient and to a degree unfathomable . It takes the vision of an artist and the dogged determination of a detective, combined with the highest understanding of our current knowledge of anatomy and animal behavior, to conjure up illustrations that are both believable and awe inspiring. This is Mauricio’s gift, and I particularly love his panoramas: colorful renditions of complete landscapes that suggest a dynamic and living storyboard of creatures and events from tens of thousands of years ago–millions, in some...