Julie Curry, age 7, of Garden Grove, California, for her question:

When did the sabre tooth tiger live?

Once upon a time, this terrible tiger lived right in your neighborhood. Of course, this was long before the city of Garden Grove had been built. Perhaps it was even before any people lived in Southern California. If you could go back and take a peek at the way things were in those long ago days, you would see the sabre tooth tiger and many other surprises. And most likely you would be very cold.

The sabre tooth tiger prowled around Southern California during the Ice Ages. We know this because his fossil bones have been found in the Around. In those days, many strange birds and animals were trapped in the gummy La Brea Tar Pits near Los Angeles. This sticky tar preserved their bones. About 100 years ago, people started to dig up these fossils. Among other things, they found hundreds of skeletons of sabre tooth tigers, proving that at one time those terrible tigers were very plentiful.

Scientists have clever ways of figuring out when ancient animals lived. They say that the tar pits have been trapping creatures for 30,000 years and maybe as long as 100,000 years. During this time, monster glaciers covered vast lands in the north. They did not reach Southern California, but even there the winters were cold and snowy and the summers were cooler than the winters are now. The sabre tooth tiger prowled around this chilly world about 50,000 years ago.

His bones tell us that he was a large cat like creature, larger than a modern tiger. Two terrible teeth explain why people named him the sabre tooth tiger. In his top jaw he had two extra long teeth, curved like those deadly swords we call sabres. Some of the fossil sabre teeth measure nine inches, some ten and the largest are twelve inches long. His skin and flesh decayed ages ago, so we don't know the color of his coat. Naturally, the big cat hunted for meat. He used his sabre teeth to stab his victims and then slice his meat into bite sized portions. He also had a full set of regular teeth to chew each mouthful.

The great sabre tooth tiger shared his world with many other surprising animals. There were shaggy sloths as big as cows, giant bears, giant elephants and even giant lions. There were huge wolves and wide winged vultures    and also ponies and deer sized camels that had no humps. If you could go back 20,000 or 30,000 years, you would find  all these animals living in Southern California. Most of them departed before people arrived. And about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, the sabre tooth tiger departed forever d from the entire world.

It seems that he began to disappear when the weather became warmer after the last Ice Age. No one knows why the mighty animal failed to survive. He fed on grass eating animals    and for some unknown reason, they left North America. Perhaps the tiger was too big and cumbersome to catch the speedy animals that stayed behind. Or perhaps his two over sized teeth became too clumsy and he perished from hunger. But nobody knows definitely why the sabre tooth tiger departed.

The big bears and the huge elephants of the Ice Ages no longer exist. But their smaller descendants survive in the modern world. The sabre tooth tiger was a mighty cat. But he was not a direct ancestor of our present lions and tigers. He belonged to a different branch of the cat family. And when he died out, this branch of the cats perished from the earth forever    and became extinct.