It defies common sense that an agile and energetic animal with a knife-toothed head nearly the size of a Smart car wouldn’t use its well-endowed anatomy to take down prey but would just walk around picking up leftovers. It also runs against what we know about modern carnivores: very few meat-eaters are pure scavengers, and the outliers that do it well—vultures, for instance—are fliers that can survey wide areas from above and swoop down whenever they see (or smell) a decaying body.
