Hyenas: Bone Crushers, Matrilineal Societies, and the Worst PR in the Animal Kingdom

Dr. Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist and assistant curator of community science at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, has spent years studying an animal most people think they understand but largely don't. Hyenas are not dogs. They are feliforms—more closely related to cats than to canines, and even more closely to mongooses. There are four living species: spotted, striped, brown, and the aardwolf, each in its own genus. The spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) is the one most people know, and also the one most people have wrong.

What Hyenas Actually Are

The four species split into two lineages. The aardwolf (Proteles cristata) is the oddball—a small, spindly insectivore that eats up to 300,000 termites a night using a sticky, bump-covered tongue. It has nubby teeth, can't crush bone, and weighs about as much as a medium dog. The other three are "bone crushers"—a real scientific term. Their jaws generate enormous bite force (around 1,100 PSI for spotted hyenas, the highest of any terrestrial mammal), allowing them to digest everything including bone. Their stomachs are so acidic and their immune systems so robust that they are one of the few species known to be a natural endpoint for rabies.