Rare Spinal Tumors Found in Saber-Toothed Cats Trapped at La Brea May Hint at Inbreeding Before Extinction
A spinal nerve tumor is rare enough that many doctors may go their entire careers without diagnosing one. It often causes pain first and, if left untreated, can slowly reduce function in the limb controlled by the affected nerve. The tumors appeared within a pattern of skeletal abnormalities that may point to inbreeding as the species approached extinction.
- ▪A spinal nerve tumor is rare enough that many doctors may go their entire careers without diagnosing one.
- ▪It often causes pain first and, if left untreated, can slowly reduce function in the limb controlled by the affected nerve.
- ▪The tumors appeared within a pattern of skeletal abnormalities that may point to inbreeding as the species approached extinction.
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Record
| Original publisher | Discover Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://www.discovermagazine.com/rare-spinal-tumors-found-in-saber-toothed-cats-trapped-at-la-brea-may-hint-at-inbreeding-before-extinction-49448 |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:00:00 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T04:28:52.741Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T04:28:52.741Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | jJtdMNkl_yDB · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A spinal nerve tumor is rare enough that many doctors may go their entire careers without diagnosing one. It often causes pain first and, if left untreated, can slowly reduce function in the limb controlled by the affected nerve. In humans, it appears in an estimated 0.22 to 0.38 cases per 100,000 people and results from a genetic mutation, either inherited or spontaneous.Now picture evidence of that same painful condition appearing in the fossilized spines of three separate predators that lived more than 10,000 years ago.Researchers examining thousands of bones from the La Brea Tar Pits in California found signs of the tumor in three Smilodon fatalis, the saber-toothed cat.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Discover Magazine.
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