A sabre-toothed cat that sported the fearsome teeth of felines also had the body and gait of a bear, making it a "super-predator".

So says a team led by Stephen Wroe at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, which found that the ferocious marsupial lion (Thylacoleo carnifex) shared the same super-predator body plan as Smilodon fatalis, North America's ice age sabre-tooth cat.

Wroe and his team compared the skulls, teeth and body proportions of seven extinct mammalian predators with those of 22 living species, in a bid to better understand how the extinct animals behaved.

They found that five of the extinct species fell reasonably neatly into known predator groups. Two sabre-toothed cats sit well with modern- day felines, for instance, leading the team to conclude that they probably occupied a similar ecological niche. Smilodon and Thylacoleo didn't fit into any group but they did have a lot ...