Hello Eons Comment Section! If you are looking to learn more about the borophagines, you can check out our video "The Rise and Fall of the Bone-Crushing Dogs" and if you have already watched that and just want more Eons content in general, check out our new podcast "Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time", available now wherever you get your podcasts!
What was the experiment that proved darwinism over Lamerkism. Was it epigenetics was it eugenics. Was it Sparta. Was is kids of athletes was it the mice trained to fear the smell of flowers having ofspring afraid of the same smell was it the conditions in the womb affecting rest of our lives was it Sprm epi genetics
I would love a video on the various hand gestures used by presenters. Is it all freestyle? Do they get training? Is it more nature or nurture? A breakdown of some of the more complex moves would be fascinating. Also, I am an avid gesturer. Would this be enough to get me a job with yous?
Plenty of people actually look down on hyenas as being revolting scavengers but hyenas are actually very important predators in their ecosystems. They prevent diseases from carcasses and carrion to spread by eating them.
I've always considered hyenas to be to cats, what bears are to dogs; a distant relative that is also a top predator, but has an extremely different lifestyle.
@darknightoftroy In their hunting behaviour maybe, but they betray their cat-like heritage in their grooming behaviour and the way they mark their territories.
There was another massive hyena called Dinocrocuta which is estimated to be an bulky animal like short faced bears. Hyena evolutionary history is fascinating, they had a glorious past.
I was going to say PBS Eons should follow up the hyena video with a dinocrocuta video. From What I understand or recalled they weren't exactly in the hyena family but cousin of hyenas.
@Douglas The Scottish Twin, actually, Barbourofelidae actually belongs to the superfamily Feloidea and are not closely related to nimravids, nimravids evolved before both members of the infraorders Aeluropsia and Crocutopsia.
@@br3nnabee Even though I know foxes are canines and that you mean "the reverse is true of foxes" I still just had the longest brain dead moment where I was like, "foxes are related to cats!?"
Feliform diversification is centered in africa and south asia, while Caniform diversification is centered in north America and northern Eurasia. There are some exceptions to this rules, but they are just that: exceptions. So there is a fair amount of convergent evolution between the two, because they evolved partly separated... though with this weird pump effect where they would occasionally have a clade that did really well and crossed territory.
So excited for this episode! I love hyenas; they are amazing creatures with dynamic matriarchal hierarchies. Their birth process is terrifying. They can digest bone. Their bite force is 1,100psi. What's not to love?
Hyenas often get a bad reputation and you can kinda thank the Lion King for that. But they're actually awesome animals with equally awesome ancestors! Hyenas will always be awesome to me, whether it's their extinct relatives or modern day species, they're all awesome!
Hyenas' bad rep is more the fault of our own bad night vision. Hyena clan makes a kill at night; lion pride hijacks the carcass; humans wake up at dawn and see hyenas having to swipe or scavenge bits from the kill *they* made; humans think lions are mighty hunters and hyenas are freeloading scum. It took night-vision photography to teach us we had it backwards.
After watching this video, I immediately went and googled aardwolves. What a strange and unique animal. It's literally a tiny hyena that only eats termites.
I feel like this episode comepletely misses the fact that spotted hyenas HUNT the majority of their food. Up to 95% of their food is hunted. This episode completely subscribes to the trope that hyenas are only scavengers, but rather we see that the spotted hyena stayed more generalised and was able to compete with the big cats and dogs through sociability. Very interesting video but so many of the points made miss the fact that hyenas are hunting animals first
This story reminded me of my homeland's fosa (Cryptoprocta ferox). I would love if you guys can do a breakdown on it. The only thing it's known for outside of Madagascar is for a mediocre DreamWorks franchise. But it's a fascinating animal.
I would love a video about the evolution of lungs, specifically how and when did unidirectional flow appear, and why is it so heavily associated with birds, flight and being endothermic when we have flightles, ectothermic reptiles that share that unidirectional air flow. As usual, amazing content, I can't get enought of your vids.
Hyenas still exist in India too. They are called striped Hyenas. you can find them in the deserts or even in hill stations. Edit: They look Much more menacing than the spotted hyenas with their (what I think is a ) mane.
They may look more menacing, but striped hyenas are the second-smallest hyena species after aardwolves and don't live in big clans, so they are probably not that dangerous.
@@Kuhmuhnistische_Partei Although they are known to dig up human corpses to eat them, so some people put stones over the graves to prevent them from exhuming and consuming them.
I like how they live as pairs in a territory, but they have like 10 dens in that territory and usually don't even live in the same ones at the same time and ignore each other most of the time. And when it comes to procreation, they don't necessarily have pups togethers, it's very likely that the female will be impregnated by another male and the male will probably impregnate another female.
Eons makes me wish I had been a paleontologist, with the ability to look at a single bone and infer an entire skeleton, and the ability to look at a skeleton and infer the ecological niche and likely behaviour of the extinct animal.
That was absolutely fascinating. A major mammalian clade I knew almost nothing about. I was familiar with Aardwolves. However, finding out that they are actually the last of the "dog like hyenas" at the end was a M. Night Shyamalan twist. I spent the whole video up until that point thinking what a shame it was that none of them are left, especially when that long legged runner made it to within a million years of the present.
It's strange that dogs out competed hyenas when today hyenas dominate over African wild dogs unless an entire pack of African wild dogs is arrayed against one or two hyenas.
@Leo The British-Eurasian Well actually only the spotted hyena have that. The brown hyena, striped hyena, and aardwolf do not share that trait and give birth normally.
@@setonacademyyena4893 Since cave hyenas were a subspecies of spotted hyenas, then they probably had the same birthing system. Not sure about Pachycrocuta though.
Wow! Hyenas were a evolutionary Pow, Zam, and fizzle as they sizzled. I appreciate all who did the research to help Eons to bring this to watch in an awesome video! 🥰🐱 And they were closer to kitties! Powerful!
I love your show. Watching it is the best escape I can think of. I really wish I could gain the courage to go back to school and do what you guys do. But I feel like that ship has sailed away. Thank you for taking the time to educate every one of us of our home's history
that was a lot of information about hyena evolution I never heard of until now... really interesting how many different hyena species adapted to different evolutionary niches used to exist all over the planet
Can you Make a Video on how much time the Non-Avian Dinosaurs actually take to go extinct after the Asteroid impact. How many years or thousands of years?
I love hyenas. And also cheetahs. Cheetahs chirp in the cutest way, are amazingly chill and friendly, and their babies mimic honey badgers to deter predators.
@@Foolish188 yeah and almost all of those bites are preventable by listening to the dog's body language and warnings, so I'm sure that those of us willing to put in the work will find it worth it. Besides no one invited you to this timeline anyways
Yeah, the video kinda miscommunicates how spotted hyenas get their food. They hunt like 60-90% of their prey themselves, so it was wrong to imply they wouldn't chase animals. Striped hyenas and brown hyenas are the scavengers of the family.
Such a shame that, for many people, hyenas are those dumb animals that laughed during The Lion King. They are incredibly fascinating and beautiful animals
I love the history of the bone crushing dogs! You explain it so well for someone who wasn't well versed in their lineage. It's such an interesting chain of evolution, and I think it's funny how the long legged 'hyena' ended up being our modern day aardwolf that now consumes termites.
Watching this channel always makes me think about all the animals that existed and just didn't have what it takes to survive. If so many species have died out, why do we think humans can stop that from happening today? I understand not totally destroying every habitat, but sometimes things just go extinct. I doubt humans can do much about it without basically ceasing to exist ourselves. Sad things just happen sometimes.
@@dungeoneerofphilosophyphd172 Yea we have an impact on many species, but we are just as much a part of nature as anything else. We used to be creatures that lived in trees and nature's will propelled us into what we are today. I don't see us as being wrong by doing what we can to survive, every living thing does what it must. It's not like I want everything to go extinct, but I think it's more important that humans thrive in any way we can.
@@sullafelix649 nature has no "will," no plan nor desires. Human prosperity is directly contingent upon stopping what we are doing. Furthermore, oil, gas, monoculture farming, and urbanization aren't about "survival." Their continued use is tied directly to the bank accounts of different global oligarchs.
I find it interesting how hyenas and canids mirror eachother in the fossil record. They both evolved into two different branches, one specialised for sprinting pursuit (I.e. modern dogs and Casmaporthetes) and one specialising in bone-crushing (modern hyenas, and Borophaginae), except only the sprinting dogs and the bone-crushing hyenas survived to today. Same evolutionary histories, but different results. They're a great example of convergent evolution. And when we today see spotted hyenas and wild dogs competing over prey and territory it's like watching two alternate versions of the same story collide.
Even now modern hyenas have the strongest bite force of any land predator other than polar bears, Tasmanian devils, jaguars, and crocodiles/alligators.
Hyenas are such wonderful, unique creatures. They have even inspired a fantasy culture I am writing about, with their complex matriarchal packs and their total consumption of carcasses.
Yay Hyenas! One of my favorite animals. In my Animal Studies class at university, we had to do two book reports from a series of books about animals, each book is an animal family. One of the reports I did was on the Hyena book, so much fun. Fun seeing all the surprised faces of students asking "You wanted to do Hyenas?" too.
The suborder Feliformia (Cat-Like Carnivorans) is divided into two infraorders, Aeluropsia (meaning "cat-shaped faced ones" in latin) and Crocutopsia (meaning "hyena-shaped faced ones" in latin), the former includes only Felidae as its only extant family while the latter includes all the other extant families of feliform carnivorans, the aardwolf, hyenas, african palm civet, linsangs, oyans, genets, civets, mongooses, and malagasy carnivorans are all fairly similar as they are all sometimes mistaken to be related to caniforms, the infraorder Crocutopsia is defined by the fact that all these nine families Protelidae, Hyaenidae, Nandiniidae, Prionodontidae, Poianidae, Genettidae, Viverridae, Herpestidae, and Eupleridae have many caniform-like characteristics and most members are obligate omnivores, Crocutopsia contains two superfamilies, Hyaenoidea (includes Protelidae and Hyaenidae) and Viverroidea (includes Nandiniidae, Prionodontidae, Poianidae, Genettidae, Viverridae, Herpestidae, and Eupleridae), with 88 extant species and seven families, Viverroidea is by far the largest and most diverse superfamily of extant carnivorans.
@Pierre Abbat, actually, linsangs (family Prionodontidae) are actually in the superfamily Viverroidea within the infraorder Crocutopsia, within the superfamily Viverroidea, Prionodontidae is only more derived than Nandiniidae but basal to the clade consisting of Poianidae + (Genettidae + (Viverridae + (Herpestidae + Eupleridae))), in fact, the superfamily Viverroidea is actually the sister group to the superfamily Hyaenoidea (Hyenas and Aardwolf), therefore cats (family Felidae) are not closely related to any other extant family of feliform carnivorans, making Felidae the most different and distantly related from all other groups, Felidae is the only extant family within the superfamily Feloidea and the infraorder Aeluropsia, all the other extant feliform families belong to the infraorder Crocutopsia, mainly since most of the other extant feliforms don't look very much like cats and look more like caniforms, therefore a division into the infraorders Aeluropsia (includes only Felidae) and Crocutopsia (includes all other extant feliforms) would make more sense.
