Hyenas are often called "African second brothers", to the effect that the lion boss it is the second oldest, because this guy with a huge head, a strong body, even the leopard does not dare to fight with it, so there is basically no opponent except for the lion, but many friends do not know or confused is that although the hyena is called a dog, but it is very different from other canines in zoological classification, and even some say that it is a feline, what is going on?
In fact, hyenas do not belong to neither canines nor cats, in the zoological classification it has a separate family name, that is, hyenas, if you go further up, then it belongs to the cat-type family (formerly a cat-shaped suborder), and the cat-type family contains 4 families, namely felines, badgers, civets, hyenas, that is to say, domestic cats, tigers, leopards, badgers, hyenas, etc. belong to the general family of cats, but it can not be said that badgers and hyenas are cats, because they have specialized classifications.
But if we only look at the appearance and habits of hyenas, we will undoubtedly recognize it as a canine, because in terms of its face shape, body shape, size, appearance, etc., they are very similar to canines, and they are very different from cats, so why doesn't the zoological classification classify it into canines? This is actually distinguished by biologists from the skull morphology and tooth pattern of hyenas, and from the genetic analysis point of view, hyenas are also closer to felines, and slightly farther away from canines, so hyenas are divided into a separate family, that is, hyenas, and classified into the general family of cats.
In fact, canines are the same, we all know that dogs, wolves, jackals, foxes belong to the canine family, but the whole family is only a branch of the canine family (also known as the suborder canines), and the canine family includes canines, bears, raccoons and ferrets are various families, can we think of bears and weasels are also more closely related to canines? Doesn't it seem that they are very different? In fact, this is the same relationship between domestic cats, tigers and hyenas.
Some time ago I wrote an article, which in order to explain the fighting ability of two families of animals and felines, the article classified hyenas as dogs and leopards for comparison, the result is that many friends came out to correct, saying that hyenas belong to the feline family, in fact, I do not know the division of hyenas in animal taxonomy, but I just think that hyenas are basically no different from canines in terms of body shape structure and living habits, so such a comparison was made, but this is indeed easy to cause controversy, and it will also be considered common sense errors. Therefore, I don't think that should be said now, but some friends say that it is a feline is also wrong, if you want to compare, the best way is to take it out separately.
Our common hyenas are basically African spotted hyenas, in fact, the hyena family is divided into 4 genera and 4 species, with two subfamilies: the hyena subfamily and the coyote subfamily. They are spotted hyenas of the genus Spotted Hyena, brown hyenas of the genus Brown Hyena, Hyenas of the genus Hyena (striped hyenas), and coyotes (crown hyenas) of the genus Coyotes.
But in history, there have actually been many types of hyenas, leopard hyenas have appeared on the North American continent, and there have been Pliocene bone-crushing hyenas in the Ali region of Tibet, which is a large hyena, the name is not that the bones of this hyena are fragile, but that their teeth are hard, the bite force is strong, and they can easily bite the bones of their prey.
The largest hyena that has appeared in biological history is also in China, existing more than 3 million years ago, in paleontological classification they are called giant hyenas (also known as giant hyenas), shoulder height up to 1.7 meters, weight up to 380 kg or more, is the largest modern African spotted hyena four times, larger than the size of the largest Northeast tiger in the feline family, from the distribution of its fossil excavations, mainly living in China's Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia area.