shows that eagles of this nature will take surprisingly large prey — 

 in this case, the victim weighed 19.6 kg. 



Some of the potentially dangerous carnivores known in southern 

 Africa from Swartkrans Member 1 times onward, particularly in 

 savanna-grassland environments, will now be briefly considered. 



Family Felidae 



Subfamily Felinae: the true cats 



Panthera pardus Linnaeus, 1758. The leopard 



Particularly well represented in the earlier Swartkrans members, as well as 

 at other sites, apparently very little different then from contemporary leop- 

 ards, although slightly smaller. 



Felis crassidens Broom, 1948. The crassidens cat 



Initially described from Kromdraai A, this remarkable short-faced cat of 



leopardlike proportions had skull characteristics of both a leopard and a 



cheetah. 



Panthera leo (Linnaeus, 1758). The lion 



Fragmentary fossil remains of lions have been found at several of the hom- 

 inid-bearing cave sites and these are tentatively assigned to the modern lion 

 taxon, although they seem to indicate a rather more robust carnivore than 

 the contemporary lion. 



Dinofelis barlowi (Broom, 1937). The false saber-tooth cat 

 The regular occurrence of fossils of this remarkable cat in the South African 

 cave deposits suggests that it may have frequented caves as lairs. The most 

 striking feature of Dinofelis is the considerable enlargement of the upper 

 canines, which, however, were not laterally flattened as in the true saber- 

 tooths. On the basis of particularly well-preserved fossil specimens from 

 the Langebaanweg site in the western Cape, Hendey (1974) wrote, 

 "Dinofelis was evidently a heavily built animal, with the fore and hind feet, 

 and perhaps the limbs in general, being more equally proportioned than in 

 either the leopard or cheetah, and possessing a relatively short tail. Its lo- 

 comotion is likely to have been ambulatory." 



Subfamily Machairodontinae: the saber-tooth cats 



Although a variety of saber-tooth cats is known to have occurred in southern 

 Africa prior to two million years ago, only one species makes a regular 

 appearance in the cave deposits after that time: 



Megantereon whitei (Broom, 1937). White's saber-tooth 

 The upper canines of this remarkable predator were long, recurved and 

 strongly flattened from side to side. Its forequarters and neck muscles were 

 very heavily built, suggesting that this was an ambush-killer of large prey. 

 According to Martinez-Navarro and Palmquist (1996), White's sabre tooth 

 colonised Europe from Africa, as far north as the 40th parallel, at the Plio- 



12 



