Nimravus major Lucas, 1898 - fossil false sabertooth mammal skull from the Oligocene of Nebraska, USA. (museum signage, Nebraska State Museum of Natural History, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA)

This species is also known by other nomens, including Nimravus brachyops and Pogonodon brachyops.

Museum info.: "Innocent Assassins A 25 million-year-old cat fight

This remarkable specimen consists of the skull of an extinct cat-like predator with its canine tooth piercing the leg bone of another cat. It inspired Nebraska-born writer and scientists Loren Eiseley to compose a poem, The Innocent Assassins, which begins: Once in the sun-fierce badlands of the west in that strange country of volcanic ash and cones, . . . we found a saber tooth, most ancient cat, far down in all those cellars of dead time.

Eiseley was a member of the museum field party that discovered this fossil in Black Hank Canyon in 1932. "

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Mammalia, Carnivora, Nimravidae

Stratigraphy: Gering Formation, Upper Oligocene

Locality: Black Hank Canyon (Black Hank's Canyon), south of the town of Bayard & ~3 miles west of Redington Gap, Wildcat Hills, western Morrill County, western Nebraska, USA

See info. at: