Trail Cameras Keep Catching a Saber-Toothed Cat — And Now Someone Can Actually Build One

Somewhere in America tonight there is a photograph of a cat that has been dead for ten thousand years, staring into a trail camera in the dark. Thousands of people believe it is real. The strange part is that the animal is real — only the date is impossible. This is the story of Smilodon: three species, not one, the largest of them close to a thousand pounds. It killed with patience rather than force, holding prey still and placing a single precise bite, because the famous seven-inch canines were thin enough to snap. At the La Brea tar pits in the middle of Los Angeles, more than three and a half million fossils have come out of the ground — including the bones of over two thousand individual saber-toothed cats. Then the world it needed disappeared. North America lost more than seventy per cent of its large mammals, and around 12,700 years ago the last individuals — the endlings — stopped falling into the tar. That was the settled answer for a century. Two things broke it: generative AI can now produce a convincing trail camera frame of anything in seconds, and in 2025 a company in Texas announced it had brought back the dire wolf. Whether or not those three pups are truly dire wolves, the word extinct stopped being the end of a sentence. SOURCES • Tseng et al., UC Berkeley, 2024 — saber-tooth milk canines as scaffolding for the erupting sabre • O'Keefe et al., Science, 2023 — fire and human-driven extinction at Rancho La Brea • Karl Shuker — the American saber-toothed cat and el tigre dantero accounts • Colossal Biosciences, April 2025 — dire wolf project; 20 edits to the grey wolf genome • Smith & Courtenay-Latimer, 1938 — the coelacanth Footage credits in the pinned comment.