Cave hyena
| Cave hyena Temporal range: Middle to Late Pleistocene, | |
|---|---|
| Crocuta crocuta spelaea skeleton from the Muséum de Toulouse. | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Carnivora |
| Suborder: | Feliformia |
| Family: | Hyaenidae |
| Genus: | Crocuta |
| Species: | C. crocuta |
| Subspecies: | †C. c. spelaea |
| Trinomial name | |
| †Crocuta crocuta spelaea Goldfuss, 1823 | |
The cave hyena (Crocuta crocuta spelaea), also known as the Ice Age spotted hyena, is a paleosubspecies of spotted hyena in Eurasia, which ranged from the Iberian Peninsula to eastern Siberia. It is one of the best known mammals of the Ice Age and is well represented in many European bone caves. It preyed on large mammals (primarily wild horses, steppe bison and woolly rhinoceros), and was responsible for the accumulation of hundreds of large Pleistocene mammal bones in areas including horizontal caves, sinkholes, mud pits, and muddy areas along rivers.
Genetic evidence from the nuclear genome suggests that Eurasian Crocuta populations (including the Asian Crocuta crocuta ultima) were highly genetically divergent from African populations, though the lack of clear separation between mitochondrial genome lineages suggests that the two populations interbred for some time after the initial split.
The cause of the cave hyena's extinction is not fully understood, though it could have been due to a combination of factors, including human activity, diminished quantities of prey animals, and climate change.