Hyenas are a fairly successful animal in Africa and are still widely distributed throughout Africa and parts of Asia today. Members of the hyena family are similar in body shape , with their fore legs longer than their hind legs , and their heads and body shapes somewhat resembling those of dogs. But they actually belong to the cat-type suborder and are closely related to civet cats. Compared with modern hyenas, there are quite a large variety of prehistoric hyenas, but most of them are only off-site branches in the evolutionary history of hyena families, one of which is the most terrifying and largest member in the history of hyena evolution, the giant hyena.
Giant hyenas are more than 2 meters long and shoulder heights of more than 1 meter, and the weight should be about 200 to 240 kilograms according to domestic scholars, and the largest may be 300 kilograms. In both size and weight, they surpass all modern land beasts except bears. Their skulls are particularly large, reaching about 40 centimeters, and their buccal teeth are larger and thicker.
Giant hyenas have unusually developed teeth and muscles, but as a price for enlarging their bodies, their speed and agility will inevitably decline. So what about the habits of the slightly clumsy giant hyena? Some scholars believe that they are too bulky to be chased for a long time, so they may be able to snatch the prey from the mouths of corpses or other carnivores with great force.
However, among the existing large beasts of prey, although many have robbed smaller predators, there is no species that purely depends on this, so it is unlikely that giant hyenas are animals that rely on snatching to survive. In addition, recently discovered fossilized giant hyena limbs show that their bodies and limbs are only larger than those of modern hyenas, and they are similar in proportion, indicating that giant hyenas may not be bulky. At the end of the Late Miocene, the giant hyena family also came to the end of its development, and its footsteps gradually drifted away, and finally disappeared into the vast laterite layer...