In which Charlie Callas does a sabercat impression

I loved all the Gary Owens & Eric Boardman dinosaur documentaries (see here, here, and here) when I was a kid, but I think my most favorite was their special on prehistoric mammals. Called "Prehistoric World," the show took a look at the Page Museum in LA and even featured a bit on Dougal Dixon's After Man creatures (including everyone's favorite, the Nightstalker).

The stop-motion mammals seen at the beginning of the show brought back fond memories, as well. They were part of another documentary I saw as a child, although I can no longer remember what it was called. What I do remember, though, is that the narrator of the show said that sabercats became extinct because their canines grew too long and they could no longer close their mouths. This is wrong, of course, and had been known to be so for quite some time. In his popular book The Meaning of Evolution (1950) G.G. Simpson addressed the issue this way;

The sabertooth is one of the most famous of animals just because it is often innocently suppossed to be an indisputable example of an inadaptive trend. In fields far remote from paleontology the poor sabertooth has some to figure as a horrible example, a pathetic case history of evolution gone wrong. Its supposed evidence is thus characteristically summarized in a book on (human) personality: "The long canine tooth of the saber-toothed tiger grew more and more into an impossible occlusion. Finally, it was so long that the tiger could not bite effectively, and the animal became extinct." Now, like so many things that everyone seems to know, this is not true... Throughout their history the size of sabertooth canines varied considerably from one group to another but varied about a fairly constant average size, which is exactly what would be expected if the size were adaptive at all times and there were no secular trend in adaptive advantage but only local and temporary differences in its details. The biting mechanism in the last sabertooths was still perfectly effective, no less and probably no more so than in the Oligocene. To characterize a finally ineffective a mechanism that persisted without essential change in a group abundant and obviously highly successful for some 40,000,000 years seems quaintly illogical! In short, the "inadaptive trend" of the sabertooth is a mere fairy tale, or more fairly, it was an error based on too facile conclusion from imperfect information and it has since been perpetuated as a scientific legend.

You will also want to keep an eye out for a few special guest appearances in the show. There's Charlie Callas as a Page Museum tour guide, Frank Nelson at the entry booth, and Bill Saluga as a camel expert. You might not recognize the names, but they're hard to miss when they show up on screen.