At the British Museum's Natural History Museum, Pomona had seen many animal specimens. Some had been made from real animals, while others had been reconstructed from fossils and paleontologists' imaginations. Perhaps they had not looked the way the specimens depicted them in ancient times.
Saber-toothed tigers had been predators active during the Ice Age. They possessed a pair of long fangs and were twice the size of modern lions, mainly because their primary prey at the time had been mammoths. Mammoths were enormous, thick-skinned, and slow-moving. Though saber-toothed tigers were not as agile as modern tigers or cheetahs, they could handle them easily enough. Combined with their own weight, their fangs could pierce a mammoth's hide.
Later, as the climate warmed, mammoths migrated north, and saber-toothed tigers' prey became animals such as deer and horses. At that point, their massive size was no longer an advantage.
They were too large. They needed sufficiently tall vegetation to conceal them during ambushes, and their enormous teeth also prevented them from running fast enough to catch agile deer and horses. In the end, the once-successful saber-toothed tigers were eliminated.
Darwin's theory of evolution was about natural selection and survival of the fittest, but "the fittest" was not necessarily the strongest. Compared with saber-toothed tigers, humans had neither terrifying fangs nor sharp claws, not even skin as thick as a mammoth's.
Yet they had emerged from the frozen wastes of the Ice Age, replaced the dinosaurs, and become Earth's new rulers.
However, in certain isolated places where the environment had not changed drastically, ancient creatures believed extinct still continued to exist.
The Beast of Gévaudan had been active in 1764. Before then, Earth had experienced the Little Ice Age and was gradually warming up. Perhaps that had been the environment in which the Beast