Did You Know?

Hyenas are not related to dogs and other facts!

Hyenas are part of the family Hyaenida, a classification shared with one other species, the aardwolf.  While they look dog-like, one of the earliest hyena species was similar to the modern African civet, Yes, a feline!   There are 3 types of hyena:  the brown, spotted and striped hyena.  On safari, you are most likely to see the spotted hyena which is the biggest of them and the most common.  You’ll often find hyena scavenging around a kill made by another predator, but they get most of their food from hunting in groups.  They have incredibly strong jaws – the largest jaw pressure of any other mammal, which allow them to crush bones.  Eating a lot of bones makes their dung white due to the large amount of calcium found in them. A team of researchers excavating a cave near Johannesburg, South Africa, discovered five human hairs preserved in fossilized brown hyena dung. Thought to be at least 200,000 years old, the hairs exceeded the previous record for the oldest known human hair by more than 190,000 years!