When I was growing up, my parents had a subscription to the Boston Globe. As a child, what mattered to me was the comics section, which I read daily, including the political cartoons that mostly went over my head. My family also had a number of comic books around, so by my teens, I had read pretty much every Doonesbury strip that had been published, along with the original Addams Family, The Far Side, and a century’s worth of New Yorker cartoons.

And somewhere in all of that, there’s a hazy memory of one cartoon in particular, that I simply cannot find on the internet. It was a sketchy one-panel job, that feels most like some of Gary Larson’s doodles, that depicted a bunch of “saber-toothed” prehistoric animals. Sure, we’ve got the tigers, but what about saber-toothed rabbits, or cows, or squirrels? As a joke, it’s worth a slight puff of air from the nostrils, at least. But hey, that’s just fun imagining, right? Plenty of extinct critters had odd teeth, but that doesn’t mean there’s a  saber-toothed version of everything, right? Well, maybe, but it turns out that one thing we did have in the past is a saber-toothed salmon!

The species was first described in the 1970s, and its former name, Smilodonicthys rastrosus, tells us exactly what paleontologists thought this fish looked like – a giant salmon with large, dagger-like fangs at the tip of its snout. For those who don’t know, Smilodon is the genus that contains all of the saber-toothed cats. It turns out that that image was about 90% right – the fish had the fangs, but they didn’t point down, they pointed sideways. It’s less saber-toothed tiger, and more warthog:

This picture is a compilation of four images, labeled A, B, C, and D. “A” is in the top left corner, and it’s a scan of the fossilized head of the extinct salmon, with the “saber-tooth” highlighted and drawn over in green and yellow, pointing downward in the “saber-tooth” position that had been originally proposed. B is on the bottom left, showing a view of the fossilized skull from the front, showing the “saber-teeth” pointing sideways, rather than down. “C” is on the top right, and shows an artist’s recreation of the newly proposed tooth position, pointing sideways, in a manner clearly not designed for hunting. Image “D” is the bottom right, and shows the artist’s reconstruction of the whole fish, with the same sideways-pointing “fangs”.

O. rastrosus, first described in the 1970s, has been estimated to reach up to 2.7 meters (8.9 feet) long, making it the largest member of the Salmonidae family ever discovered. Initially, researchers thought its oversized front teeth pointed backward into the mouth like fangs, in large part because fossils of the teeth were found apart from the rest of the skull. This led to the common name “saber-toothed salmon.” But through new CT scans and analysis of various Oncorhynchus rastrosus fossils collected over the years, researchers have now been able to confirm that the teeth actually pointed sideways out of the fish’s mouth, similar to a warthog. As a result, the authors say, the species should be renamed the “spike-toothed salmon.”

While it’s unclear exactly what these teeth may have been used for, the researchers believe they were likely used for fighting — either against other spiked-toothed salmon or as a defense against predators — or as a tool for digging out nests. It’s also possible the teeth were used for multiple purposes, the authors note. But the teeth likely weren’t used for catching prey, since Oncorhynchus rastrosus is believed to have been a filter-feeder that dined on plankton.

I love that. The fearsome saber-toothed salmon revealed to be a filter feeder. It reminds me of creatures like basking sharks or sturgeons, that can look fearsome at a glance, but that pose no threat to humans who leave them alone. Over the centuries, as we’ve learned more about the history of life on this planet, we’ve often looked at the bones of a deceased creature, and seen something to fear. Elephant skulls become proof of the giant, man-eating cyclops, the Iguanodon’s thumbs were assumed to be draconic horns, and a filter-feeding fish with some odd sideways teeth became the saber-toothed salmon.

Our imaginations often build the world around us into something that is harsh and terrifying by nature, when the reality is often just strange, with the real danger being our imaginations and the fear that so often drives them. For all its horrors, the so-called Natural World is indifferent to us, and those horrors come hand-in-hand with a whole lot of beauty, and some of the goofiest shit you’ve ever seen.