Pachycrocuta brevirostris and The Cave Hyena

[Sanju]

(03-16-2019, 05:02 PM)smedz Wrote: do you think the social structure of Pachycrocuta was affected by the habitat like it does with wolves?

May be...

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Humans and giant hyenas take their turns at a mammoth carcass. Credit: M. Antón, Espiagres et al. 2016

Signs of their coexistence have been found from the Iberian Peninsula to Indonesia, but, as M. Patrocinio Espigares and coauthors write in a new paper, this is the first tentative sign of interaction between the two scavenging species. Modern hyenas, for example, are capable of removing limbs or other parts of a carcass and toting them off.

With the mass of a lioness, it had massive limbs with shortened distal bones and a heavy, powerfully built mandible with robust, well-developed premolars. All these features reflect its adaptation for dismembering ungulate carcasses, transporting large pieces of them without dragging to the denning site and fracturing bones. Average estimate of mass of ∼110 kg for the giant hyena. However, the moment arm of resistance for an object positioned at the canines reveals a loss of bite strength compared with spotted hyenas and thus less predatory abilities. These results are in agreement with the scavenging niche deduced for P. brevirostris from taphonomic analysis.


This short faced Hyena or Hefty or Giant Hyeana is Scavenger (Kleptoparasitic from Saber toothed cats and other predators) than Hunter, relative contribution of hunting and scavenging to the diet of this extinct hyena. It had still preyed on and hunted slow animals like Humans like Homo habilis or Homo erectus and direct competitor to our own species. Think of a 240 pound spotted hyena with a blunter face and you've pretty much got the picture. The giant hyena Pachycrocuta brevirostris was the largest bone-cracking carnivore that ever existed.

the discovery of Pachycrocuta brevirostris was really only a rediscovery. The species evolved before 3 million years ago, the earliest appearances in Africa and Asia being nearly simultaneous, and it chewed its way into Europe by about 2 million years ago. This was around the same time that prehistoric humans were blazing trails around the planet, too, and we know that they met this hefty hyena.

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A Pachycrocuta family enjoying a nice meal. Credit: Mauricio Anton Palmqvist et al. 2011

Hyenas have watched our entire history. It was easy given that they had a few million years' head start on us. The earliest of their kind evolved from civet-like ancestors over 15 million years ago, while our earliest human ancestors didn’t break away from other apes until about 6 million years ago. Hyenas were loping around long before humans tried to hit the ground running. And of all the hyenas that ever lived, there’s one species whose paw had quite an influence shaping our past. It was the largest bone-crusher ever known, Pachycrocuta brevirostris.

Signs of both humans and Pachycrocuta surround a fossil elephant carcass in Spain, and more than half the Homo erectus bones from China's famous Dragon Bone Hill showed gnaw marks that demonstrated how effective these carnivores were at dismantling human bodies. Research by anthropologists Noel Boaz and Russell Ciochon on remains of Homo erectus unearthed alongside Pachycrocuta at the Zhoukoudian site attributed scoring and puncture patterns observed on hominin long bones and skulls—originally thought to be signs of cannibalism—to predation by Pachycrocuta [Boaz, Noel T.; et al. (2001) "The Scavenging of Peking Man"].

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Pachycrocuta gnawing on a bone. Credit: Mauricio Anton Palmqvist et al. 2011

Most of the Homo erectus scraped up from the 750,000 – 400,000 year old cave sediments show how the local Pachycroctua busted up their bodies. But whether as rivals or prey, our fate was tied to theirs for an immense span of time. For hundreds of thousands of years after humans left Africa, paleontologist Joan Madurell-Malapeira and colleagues concluded in a recent paper, our forebears competed with Pachycrocuta for rights to meaty megafaunal carcasses.

The short-faced hyena was only about as tall as today's spotted hyena, meaning it was a burly, stocky carnivore that would have looked lower-slung than its modern relatives.

Espigares, M., Martínez-Navarro, B., Palmqvist, P., Ros-Montoya, S., Toro, I., Agustí, J., Sala, R. 2016. Homo vs Pachycrocuta: Earliest evidence of competition for an elephant carcass between scavengers at Fuente Nueva-3 (Orce, Spain).

To the consternation paleontologists, early humans did not immortalize Pachycrocuta in art for us to know how this giant really behaved.
The beast died out before we got around to inventing symbolism. We were more concerned with meat.

Whether the huge hyenas hunted alone or in packs, relied on robbing other kills or hunted their own protein, or were striped, spotted, or wore a different pattern altogether or whether Hyena origin is Africa or Asia (most ancient fossils of Hyena species are just almost same old from both Africa and Asia) are all questions that currently have no answers. But I can’t help but wonder how they shaped our past. You can’t live in the shadow of such an impressive carnivore for over a million years and remain unchanged.

Madurell-Malapeira, J., Alba, D., Espigares, M., Vinuesa, V., Palmqvist, P., Martínez-Navarro, B., Moyà-Solà, S. 2015. Were large carnivorans and great climatic shifts limiting factors for hominin dispersals? Evidence of the activity of Pachycrocuta brevirostris during the Mid-Pleistocene Revolution in the Vallparadís Section (Vallès-Penedès Basin, Iberian Peninsula).

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