![]() Hyena Image - Free Image Download Printing and Framing Hyena Prints (Artwork) for Your Home or Office This page is designed to give you ideas on types of prints that might work and some general information around your chosen animal prints theme. Order prints and have them carefully rolled and safely secured in a cardboard cylinder and delivered to your door. Mammal Animals: |
Hyena PrintsYoung hyena name: cub, pup, whelp Female hyena: bitch Male hyena: dog A group of hyenas is called: clan, cackle Hyena classification: hyenine Hyena class: Mammal The Hyaenidae is a mammalian family of order Carnivora. The Hyaenidae family, native to both African and Asian continents consists of four living species, the Striped Hyena and Brown Hyena (genus Hyaena), the Spotted Hyena (genus Crocuta) and the Aardwolf (genus Proteles). Hyenas seem to have originated 26 million years ago from arboreal ancestors bearing similarities to the modern Banded Palm Civet. Plioviverrops, one of the earliest hyenas, was a lithe civet-like creature that inhabited Eurasia 20-22 million years ago. Details from the middle ear and dental structure marked it as a primitive hyena. This genus proved successful, its descendants flourishing with more pointed jowls and racier legs, much as the Canidae had done in North America. Fifteen million years ago, dog-like hyenas flourished, with 30 different species being identified. Unlike some of their modern descendants, these hyenas were not specialized bone-crushers, but were more nimble, wolf-like animals. The dog-like hyenas had canid-like molars, allowing them to supplement their carnivorous diet with vegetation and invertebrates. Five to seven million years ago, the dog-like hyenas were outcompeted by canids traveling from North America to Eurasia via the Bering land bridge. The ancestral aardwolves survived by having adapted themselves to an insectivorous diet to which few canids had specialized. Some hyenas evolved bone crushing teeth which allowed them to avoid competition with the canids, resulting in the hyenas eventually outcompeting a family of similarly built bone crushers called percrocutoids. The percrocutoids became extinct 7 million years ago, coinciding exactly with the rise of bone crushing hyena species. Unlike the canids who flourished in the newly colonized Eurasian continent, only one hyena species, the cheetah-like Chasmaporthetes managed to cross to North America. It became extinct 1.5 million years ago. The peak diversity of the Hyenidae was during the Pleistocene, with 4 genera and 9 species of hyena. The bone crushing hyenas became the Old World's dominant scavengers, managing to take advantage of the amount of meat left over from the kills of sabre-toothed cats. One such species was Pachycrocuta, a up 200 kg (440 lb) mega-scavenger that could crush elephant bones. As the sabre-toothed cats began to die out and be replaced by short-fanged felids which were more efficient eaters, more hyenas began to hunt for themselves and began evolving into new species, the modern spotted hyena being among them. The list follows McKenna and Bells Classification of Mammals for prehistoric genera (1997) and Wozencraft (2005) in Wilson and Reeders Mammal Species of the World for extant genera . The Percrocutids are in contrast to McKenna and Bells classification not included as a subfamily into the Hyaenidae but as a separate family Percrocutidae. Furthermore, the genus Paracrocuta, to which the living brown hyena belongs, is not included into the genus Pachycrocuta but in the genus Hyaena. The Protelinae (Aardwolves) are not traded as a separate subfamily but included in the Hyaeninae. Spotted Hyenas and, to a lesser extent, Striped and Brown Hyenas, have powerful carnassial teeth adapted for cutting flesh and premolars for crushing bone. Spotted hyenas have a strong bite proportional to their size, but the view that they have the strongest bite is a myth; and a number of other animals (including the Tasmanian devil) are proportionately stronger. The Aardwolf has greatly reduced cheek teeth, sometimes absent in the adult, but otherwise has the same dentition as the other three species. The dental formula for all hyena species is: Hyena TriviaWhat do you call a baby hyena? What do you call a female hyena? What do you call a male hyena? What do you call a group of hyenas? Question: What is the scientific classification of a hyena? Question: What class is a hyena in? |