Machairodus lahayishupup could easily have taken on prey weighing several tons. To identify the new saber-toothed cat species, Orcutt, who is now an assistant professor of biology at Gonzaga University, and Calede painstakingly investigated the forearm bones of lions, jaguars, tigers, and other modern big cats to determine whether their elbow shapes could reliably differentiate one species from the next. “We found we could quantify the differences on a fairly fine scale,” Calede says in a press release. “This told us we could use the elbow shape to tell apart species of modern big cats.” Then they turned to the fossil record, examining the same morphological markers on the museum specimens.