A new species of giant meat-eating mammal has been identified from fossil fragments found in a forgotten museum drawer.
The bones of the gigantic carnivore dubbed Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, meaning “big African Lion” in Swahili, had been kept in a Kenyan museum drawer for decades, according to National Geographic.
The specimens were placed in a drawer at Nairobi National Museum after being excavated between 1978 and 1980. They were not given much attention until Ohio University researchers Nancy Stevens and Matthew Borths rediscovered them and teamed up in 2017 to begin analyzing the unusual fossil.
"Opening a museum drawer, we saw a row of gigantic meat-eating teeth, clearly belonging to a species new to science," Borths said in a press release.
Scientists categorized the creature, one of the biggest ever meat-eating mammals, as part of an extinct group of mammals called hyaenodonts, so named because their teeth resemble those of a modern-day hyena.
“Larger than a polar bear, with a skull as large as that of a rhinoceros and enormous piercing canine teeth, this massive carnivore would have been an intimidating part of the eastern African ecosystems occupied by early apes and monkeys,” Ohio University wrote in a news release.
The huge animal, likely an apex predator when it lived around 22 million years ago, was identified from most of its jaw, portions of its skull and a partial skeleton, Ohio University said.
“The most striking feature of Simbakubwa is the size of the specimen,” the report authors wrote.
“Based on its massive dentition, the animal was significantly larger than any modern African terrestrial carnivore.”
But Simbakubwa is not closely related to big cats or any other mammalian carnivore alive today, the university said.
"This is a pivotal fossil, demonstrating the significance of museum collections for understanding evolutionary history," Stevens wrote.
"Simbakubwa is a window into a bygone era. As ecosystems shifted, a key predator disappeared, heralding Cenozoic faunal transitions that eventually led to the evolution of the modern African fauna."
The findings were reported in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology this week.
