A half century ago, a construction company unearthed the remains of a saber-toothed cat that had lived 11,000 years ago in what is now downtown Nashville .
A quarter century ago, that discovery resulted in the naming of a pro sports team. But about the same time, one of the prehistoric cat’s teeth went missing.
The strange story begins in August 1971. Workers were digging on the site of what is now the UBS Tower when they stumbled across bones in an underground chasm. The construction project was halted for a few weeks while scientists studied what they had found.
It turns out, you see, that downtown Nashville sits on a series of vertical caverns. And in the fall of 1971, while the construction project was halted, archaeologists and paleontologists found about a thousand bones in a cavern. In one section, high up, they discovered human remains, which were later determined to be from the Woodland Era (about 1,000-3,000 years old). In another, down low, they discovered the bones of a saber-toothed cat, along with those of other pre-historic animals including elephants, horses and camels — all of which were known to roam Middle Tennessee at one time.
At the time, the saber-toothed cat bones were carbon dated to be between 8,700 and 9,600 years old, which is about 2,000 years younger than any saber-toothed cat remains ever found in North America. Today, the scientific community doubts the accuracy of that carbon dating, and the feeling now is that the bones are more like 11,000 years old.