© Mauricio Anton
An artist's rendering of Simbakubwa kutoaafrika, which lived 22 million years ago and had a huge skull, as large as a rhinoceros.
An artist's rendering of Simbakubwa kutoaafrika, which lived 22 million years ago and had a huge skull, as large as a rhinoceros.
While examining drawers at the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya, Borths, a carnivore paleontologist, opened a drawer of Ice Age specimens and noticed a row of huge teeth staring back at him. He immediately realized the gigantic jaw was not an Ice Age specimen at all. A few years earlier, Nancy Stevens, a paleontologist at Ohio University, had opened the same drawer and noticed the same set of teeth.
The fossils, which date back 22 million years, were originally unearthed when Kenyan researchers were scouring the African plains looking for ancient ape bones decades ago. They'd been hidden away in the wrong museum drawer for years. When Borth and Stevens came along, the duo quickly realized they had found a new species of prehistoric lion. The team were able to examine portions of the creature's skull, its jaw and parts of its skeleton and discovered it is the oldest specimen of a group of mammals known as hyaenodonts.
The new carnivore has been dubbed Simbakubwa kutoaafrika, which is Swahili for "big lion from Africa". It is described in a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on April 18, which suggests the beast was bigger than a polar bear and had canine teeth as big as an adult foot.
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