Apr 23, 2014 12:16 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

You frequently hear of the increasingly difficult life led by large carnivores. As their natural range has shrunk, so has the available food; carnivores can't survive on just the fruit of the land. Some large meat eaters, however, have a more adaptable diet than others, Fox reported.

A recent study sought to determine why cougars (as well as jaguars, though they weren't specifically featured in this study) survived a mass extinction 12,000 years ago and the saber tooth tiger and American lion did not -- from a dietary perspective.

"Before the Late Pleistocene extinction, six species of large cats roamed the plains and forests of North America," co-author Larisa R.G. DeSantis, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University, said in a press release. "Only two -- the cougar and jaguar -- survived. The goal of our study was to examine the possibility that dietary factors can explain the cougar's survival."

Researchers found that it wasn't just the variety of meat consumed that enabled cougars to survive when food was scant, but the degree to which they ate their meals. By analyzing tooth patterns of ancient saber tooths, American lions, and cougars, they deemed the patterns of cougars most similar to hyenas -- known for using every part of a carcass. Saber tooths' teeth most resembled African lions (which chew on meat and bone but not to the degree that hyenas do) while American lions most resembled modern cheetahs (considered picky eaters that tend towards lean meat and don't chew the bone).

"This suggests that the Pleistocene cougars had a 'more generalized' dietary behavior," DeSantis said. "Specifically, they likely killed and often fully consumed their prey, more so than the large cats that went extinct."

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