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The partial specimen — most of the jaw, some of the skull, additional teeth and a few other bones — appears to be that of a young adult, suggesting the animals could have reached even larger proportions. Hypercarnivores typically wear down their teeth as they age (crunching and shearing bones will do that), but because the animal died early in adulthood, its teeth are in great shape. Finding a gigantic hyainailourine specifically in eastern Africa and during the very start of the Miocene tells paleontologists that the animals got larger earlier than thought. The very existence of Simbakubwa at this time and place helps scientists flesh out an early Miocene landscape that must have been rich in megaherbivores, similar to modern elephants and rhinos, to sustain the massive hypercarnivore.

Some are caused by variants in a gene called SHANK3 which, like most genes implicated in autism, is involved in brain development and function. Robinson says that their genetics don’t neatly fall into two types of buckets, of either a few genes with big effects or many genes with small effects. In the case of genetic studies, gene changes with tiny effects can still be considered plausible if their usual role relates to brain function in some way. The cells that give rise to sperm tend to accumulate new mutations over the years, so the sperm contain sequence changes that pass to offspring but aren’t present in the father’s own body cells.

They discharge a surprising volume of white fluid that looks a bit like Elmer’s glue, which they knead as it congeals and hardens, plastering the hole. The researchers describe what happens as a “coagulation” of aphid bodily fluids which form a “scab” over the gall’s injury. But in social animals, there can also be behavioral, physiological, even social organizational ways that a so-called immune system can function — for the survival of the group as a whole. They think the body fluid the aphids secreted to plug the hole could have evolved from body fluids that would heal a wound inside an individual aphid.