Twenty-two-million-year-old bones reveal a meat-eater that ruled long before the big cats

The enormous predator, named Simbakubwa kutokaafrika — “big lion from Africa” in Swahili — roamed what is now Kenya around 22 million years ago and was probably larger than a polar bear.  However, Simbakubwa was not a cat, but one of a group of animals called hyaenodonts that includes some of the biggest predatory mammals ever to walk on Earth. Hyaenodonts were the top carnivores before hyaenas, cats, dogs and bears staged their global takeover.