ANCIENT PREDATOR: Africa’s Largest Carnivore Discovered In Museum Drawer

A forgotten museum drawer in Kenya revealed the fossilized remains of a massive, bear-sized predator with banana-length fangs — a nightmarish creature that once ruled ancient Africa, hidden in plain sight for decades.

Sometimes the most incredible discoveries happen purely by chance. Such was the case when paleontologist Matt Borths stumbled upon the fossilized remains of Africa’s largest carnivorous mammal—a terrifying beast that roamed the continent in the distant past.

Borths wasn’t digging in remote badlands or scaling treacherous cliffs. Instead, he found these remarkable fossils tucked away in the drawers of the Nairobi National Museum in Kenya. At the time, he was researching hyaenodonts, an extinct group of mammals that resembled modern hyenas (though they share no direct relation).

The bones belonged to a previously unknown species now named Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. This massive predator belongs to the hyaenodont family and is believed to have been the apex predator of ancient sub-Saharan Africa.

“Opening a museum drawer, we saw a row of gigantic meat-eating teeth, clearly belonging to a species new to science,” explained Borths, who serves as curator of the Division of Fossil Primates at Duke University.

These precious remains had been unearthed between 1978 and 1980 in Meswa Bridge, western Kenya. The original excavation team had been focused on finding ancient ape fossils, so these bones were set aside and eventually forgotten in the museum’s vast collection for decades.

Borths joined forces with fellow paleontologist Nancy Stevens, who had discovered another collection of fossils in Tanzania estimated to be even older. Together, they analyzed the long-neglected specimens, which included parts of the creature’s jaw, skeleton, skull, and teeth. Their findings have now been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, revealing a truly nightmarish prehistoric beast.

Despite its name being derived from the Swahili for “big lion,” Simbakubwa was not a cat at all. The researchers determined it was actually the oldest known member of the hyaenodont family — a distinct group of carnivorous mammals.

And “big” hardly does justice to this monster’s size. Scientists believe it was larger than a polar bear — today’s largest terrestrial carnivore. Its molars stretched more than two inches long, while its front canine teeth measured a staggering eight inches each — roughly the length of a banana. Even more terrifying, while modern predators like wolves and bears have only one pair of canine teeth, Simbakubwa boasted three pairs.

“This animal had lots of blades,” Borths noted with understated dread.

The creature stood about four feet tall at the shoulder, measured eight feet long, and weighed more than 1.5 tons — about the size of a modern car. This makes it substantially larger than any carnivorous mammal alive today.

“The science is definitely very impressive,” commented Jack Tseng, an evolutionary biologist not involved in the study. “Any time you have a new record of something this large in the fauna and ecological food web, it makes you reconsider exactly what the interactions were like between predator and prey.”

Beyond its nightmare-inducing proportions, Simbakubwa helps scientists understand the changing ecosystem from a time when Africa began shifting closer to Eurasia. This massive geographical transformation created new environmental conditions, allowing animals from both landmasses to migrate between continents. That kind of ecological exchange “raises all kinds of hell,” according to Borths.

The discovery provides valuable insights into the predator-prey relationships of ancient Africa and allows researchers to piece together more of our planet’s biological history.

“Once you figure out the relationships between these animals, you can start to do things like estimate how big do you think the common ancestor of these creatures was, what was the world like when that theoretical common ancestor might have been alive?” Borths explained.

While discoveries like this offer fascinating new perspectives on the history of life on Earth, they also remind us how fortunate we are to not share our world with such formidable predators.  Perhaps we should be glad that Noah’s flood wiped out some of these terrifying monsters.

Perhaps the next time you visit a museum, you can ask to look in the locked drawers to see if there might be something scary waiting in there that has been forgotten about.

(Source: All That’s Interesting)

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