Hidden mysteries lie in wait inside Kenya’s fossil treasury

The 23-million-year-old bones of the newly-discovered giant, Simbakubwa kutokaafrika, had been left for nearly 40 years in a drawer [Photo: Courtesy].

The only hint that something extraordinary lay inside the plain wooden drawer in an unassuming office behind Nairobi National Museum was a handwritten note stuck to the front: “Pull Carefully”.

Inside, a monstrous jawbone with colossal fangs grinned from a bed of tattered foam — the only known remains of a prehistoric mega-carnivore, larger than a polar bear, that researchers only this year declared a new species.