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About Smilodon:
First things first: although Smilodon is casually called the saber-toothed tiger, it wasn't a true tiger at all, belonging instead to an ancient, extinct line of cats known as "machairodonts." Other than that, what you've heard is mostly true: Smilodon was a huge, fierce predator that may have snacked on early humans, along with its usual diet of woolly mammoths, bison and sloths. It probably killed by leaping suddenly, digging its teeth into its prey's neck, and waiting patiently while the unfortunate animal bled to death.
In case you're wondering why Smilodon has appeared in so many movies, that may be because thousands of Smilodon skeletons have been extracted from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles (the California variant of this genus, Smilodon californicus, is the state fossil). By the way, the last specimen of Smilodon went extinct only 10,000 years ago; by then, primitive humans had figured out how to hunt cooperatively, and killed off this dangerous menace once and for all.
