Adopted Cub

11,000 years ago during the late Pleistocene epoch near the La Brea Tar Pits of California, a female American lion (Panthera atrox) lies down on the open grassland with its two cubs while some Columbian mammoths (Mammuthus columbi) feed on grass in the distance. The older American lion cub playfully chases a convex-billed cowbird (Pandanaris convexa) that was perched on the fang of a Smilodon fatalis skull, sending the bird flying away. The younger cub is being licked clean by the mother lioness, but this cub is not the biological child of the lioness, or even an American lion at all. Instead it is actually a Smilodon fatalis cub, a youngster of a different big cat species that directly competes with the American lion. While American lions and Smilodon would generally not hesitate to kill each other's cubs, this lioness mother found the abandoned sabertooth cub soon after giving birth and instead her parental instincts led to her raising it like it was her own cub.

Drawing requested by someone privately in my notes, and inspired by a known instance of an Asiatic lion adopting an Indian leopard cub. Like in modern-day east Africa, California during the Pleistocene also had a wide diversity of large predatory mammals living alongside each other that would have been mostly niche partitioned, but still directly compete with each other on occasion. Panthera atrox and Smilodon fatalis are two large extinct species of felids that both lived in Pleistocene North America, the former (commonly called the American lion) grew 2.5 meters long, larger than the 1.8-meter S. fatalis (commonly called the saber-toothed cat). Both would have hunted the many large herbivores of their habitat and the lion would probably chase off or try to kill the smaller sabertooths when they met, plus the adults of each would have killed the other's cubs when given the chance, much like the relationship between modern lions and leopards.

However, even with this hostile relationship, there is a known instance of a mother Asiatic lioness 'adopting' a leopard cub and looking after it, while also caring for her own biological lion cubs. The adopted leopard cub was seen feeding on the lioness' kills, drinking her milk and playing with its adoptive siblings. While it is not unheard of for animals to raise young of their species that isn't their own (and in fact common in some species), for these two animals that normally would kill each other's cubs to be doing it is an extremely rare case. Interspecies adoptions usually occur when the mother has just had her own offspring and her maternal instincts are most strong, which may lead to her caring for other baby animals she comes across as her own, which seemed to be what happened with the lion and leopard. Given this, it may be possible that interspecies adoption also occurred in prehistoric animals on occasion, possibly between P. atrox and S. fatalis.

Leaving a Smilodon skull around seemed like a good reminder that the two species are normally very hostile towards each other and how unlikely this event is. And I added the extinct cowbird Pandanaris because it is a creature that could appear in paleoart so much more often. I mean, like modern cowbirds it would've followed large herbivorous mammals around to eat insects disturbed by the movements of the mammals, except given that it died out when most megafaunal mammals did, it probably was even more reliant on this feeding strategy. We really could be dropping this bird around all those North American Pleistocene megafauna art following the animals around to eat insects but unfortunately we don't.

Also, first Pandanaris on DA (really, I wish we put cowbirds in Pleistocene North America art more)!