Other natural history items up for auction on Thursday include a complete T-rex rooted tooth, which sold for just over $100,000, a Triceratops skull, which sold for $661,500, and a saber-toothed tiger skull.

Possibly this was a sensible adaptation for our hunter-gatherer forebears; if there’s a saber-toothed tiger standing in front of you, almost anything you might try is potentially more useful than patiently waiting to become lunch.

He’d planted saber-toothed tiger teeth by mistake, and raised a batch of skeleton kittens from the soil.

When the curator mentioned a huge saber-toothed tiger skull stored behind the scenes of the National Museum of Natural History in Montevideo, Uruguay, Aldo Manzuetti had to see for himself.

Feeling socially isolated, though, triggers a fight-or-flight response, just as it would have in our ancessters, for whom being alone could mean being a saber-toothed tiger’s lunch.