![]() All modern carnivores-including cats, dogs, racoons, wolves, and bears-have one pair of these meat-slicing teeth. “It’s in the back of the head that this business of slicing through meat takes place,” Borths says. Stevens later asked Borths to join her lab as a postdoctoral researcher, and together the two returned to the Nairobi National Museum in 2017 to begin analyzing and describing the specimens, which included most of the animal’s jaw as well as bits of skeleton, skull, and teeth.Ĭarnivores are often noted for their front canine teeth, which help grab prey, but their back teeth are important, too. “It was like the two of us could commiserate, like, Isn’t this amazing, we should do something!” Borths says. Their fate was sealed when Stevens told Borths that she had opened the exact same drawer while working in Nairobi and had wondered about its contents. So Borths reached out to Ohio University paleontologist and National Geographic grantee Nancy Stevens, who had discovered an important fossil site in Tanzania that’s only a couple of million years older. ![]() The fossils had been excavated between 19 at a site in western Kenya called Meswa Bridge. There, he found the unusual fossils in a cabinet that was part of a collection marked “hyenas.” In 2013, paleontologist Matthew Borths was doing research at the Nairobi museum for his dissertation on the hyaenodonts, and he asked a curator if he could look at their specimens. “Before the predecessors of modern carnivorans that we’re so familiar with-lions, hyenas, wolves-before they ever evolved, the global scene of predators was essentially dominated by these hyaenodonts." Lots of blades The find “is a good chance for us to bring these other lesser known carnivorous predators to the surface,” says Jack Tseng, an evolutionary biologist and vertebrate paleontologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the study. The fossil may also help scientists better understand why these apex predators ultimately did not survive. The discovery helps connect some of the evolutionary dots for this group of massive meat-eaters, which were near the top of the food chain in the same African ecosystems where early apes and monkeys were also evolving. How much do lions eat? When do they begin to roar? Find out how many pounds of meat they devour, how loud their roars can be, and whether they are endangered.
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