Another Brutal Fact About the Ice Age Arctic: The Hyenas
As if saber-toothed cats weren’t enough.
Imagine you’re a baby mammoth. It’s 1.4 million years before the present day, in the middle of January, and you haven’t seen the sun in weeks. All around you, the Yukon tundra stretches into miles and miles of nothingness. Suddenly, a shape hurtles out of the darkness. And as you turn to meet your killer, you come face to face with … a hyena?
Since the first hyena fossil was identified in the Americas nearly a century ago, scientists have suspected that an extinct species of hyena, , must have traveled over the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia. But they never had definitive proof, until Jack Tseng, a paleontologist at the University at Buffalo, examined two mystery fossils that had sat in museum drawers for 40 years. Tseng knows.
