The African savannah, a mixture of fish and dragons, here every day staged the speed of life and death, the weak and the strong. No, a group of hyenas began to tangle with the elephants again, and under their desperate pursuit, a pregnant female elephant finally fell...
Hyenas are relentless killers of the African savannah, and they are powerful terrestrial carnivores. Compared with the elephant hyena, the height is not large, but even if they are not afraid of anyone in this grassland (as long as there are enough people), the most commonly used by them to hunt animals is the terrible extraction technique, which will fall down the female elephant is subdued by their digging the anus, this part is the weakest part of all animals, once bitten by hyenas, pain will spread throughout the body, and then the bitten animals will lose the ability to resist and fall down to be eaten by hyenas. The pregnant female elephant fell, the child in its belly was also damaged, and the hyenas cruelly went deep into the head from the part where they had just been bitten, dragging out the baby elephant in the mother elephant's belly.
Although the behavior is so cruel and bloody, but this is the real state of the African savannah, this is also the most real side of nature, perhaps in the eyes of everyone hyena this kind of predation behavior is very rogue in other words, the current words are "too dog", but there is no way, hyenas also have to survive. Since the hyena behaves so dog, what kind of dog is it?
Actually hyenas are not dogs
Although it looks like a dog and even has a dog name, it is really not a dog that does not belong to the canine family, and it belongs to the general family of cats (the general family of cats, the family of cats, the family of lynxes, the family of civets, and the hyena family, one of their common points is that the claws are mostly retractable, and the nose snout is shorter. Since it is more like a cat than a canine, it is necessary to talk about the difference between hyenas and canines.
Let's start at the beginning, at first glance a hyena looks very similar to a dog's head, but if we look at a hyena and a dog's skull, we will find a big difference. It is obvious that the hyena's snout is shorter, and the dog's snout is longer; look at the hyena's teeth, its molars and premolars are very large, the dog's molars and premolars are much smaller in this contrast, so the hyena's bite force is also greater than that of the dog, and the hyena is ranked eighth in the "Top Ten Animals with the Strongest Bite Force", the bite force can reach 1100 pounds, which is 498.951607 kg, and the dog's bite force is only 148 kg.
After talking about teeth, I will talk about another big difference between them, that is, the tongue. Hyenas, like most cats, have rough and barbed tongues, unlike dogs, where their tongues are smoother and smoother. I think this is probably also valid evidence that hyenas belong to the cat family and not to the canine family, and the tongue of canines does not have barbs. If you want to see how the barbs on the tongue are, you may wish to look at the kitten at home, after all, the hyena is so ferocious to see how easy its tongue is.
That's about the difference in the head, and then look at the difference in the shape of the hyena and the dog. Hyenas are 96-160 cm long and weigh 35-80 kg, resembling dogs, but the overall size is much larger than that of dogs. Looking closely at these two, we will also find that the hyena's neck is longer and thicker than that of a dog, and its round head and neck are thick and long, which is a beast image at first glance, and how gentle the dog looks in comparison.
After comparing the neck, we can also see from the above picture that the hyena's front legs are longer than the hind legs, so the overall body of the hyena has a slight tilt, that is, the front half of the body is higher than the back of the body; the dog's body will not be like this, because their limbs are relatively the same length. It is precisely because of the different lengths of the front and back limbs that the hyena is not very elegant when running, but this structure is quite endurance and fast, its running speed can reach 50-60 kilometers per hour, and it will not feel any fatigue in long-distance attacks.
The last difference in appearance is between hyenas and dogs, hyenas are mostly brownish yellow or tan hair, and there are many irregular black-brown spots on the body, and there are no these spots on the dog's body. So in summary, we can judge the difference between hyenas and dogs and canines from the appearance of simple, and in terms of living habits, we will find that hyenas and canines may be more similar, they live in groups hunting, but hyena hunting is more efficient and ferocious than canines, and all this is because it has feline genes.
The gene sequencing results show that
According to previous data, we can clearly know that both felines and canines belong to a large class of "carnivorous orders", in order to better distinguish who is closer to hyenas, scientists have found the answer for us through genetic sequencing technology:
The above figure is the relationship between the various families within the carnivorous order listed according to the gene sequencing technology, and through the result of gene sequencing, we can clearly get a message: the relationship between the hyena family and the badger family is the closest. Then they belong to the order Civet cats, the order of cats and cats superfamily, dipteraidae, etc. constitute the "cat suborder", in today's cat suborder has been downgraded to the cat type family, so hyenas belong to the cat type family.
After reading the relationship diagram, we can probably guess that more than 40 million years ago, the common ancestor of the carnivorous order began to develop in two routes due to the cold and dry earth's climate in the middle of the Eocene, and some of them continued to stay in the forest to become the ancestors of the cat-type family, and some came to the land to become the ancestors of the canine family (the suborder canine type was downgraded to the general family of canines).
Later, some of the animals of the cat-type family also came to land, and they were the general family of badgers. Since choosing to come to land, they must have the ability to adapt to land, so the animals of the family of badgers are constantly evolving themselves to become stronger and survive on land, and one of them has become the hyena family today.
Hyenas have evolved a huge body, good running ability and strong fighting ability, which is very similar to the African wild dogs in the same region, since hyenas are no longer canines, it can only mean that they are a result of convergent evolution, and it is not surprising that they have common carnivorous ancestors.
But according to all of our comparisons and analyses above, we will also find that there are still many differences between the two, which explains well that hyenas are not dogs, so in the future, we should not misunderstand hyenas as canines, and their names do not represent anything.
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