Cave hyena

Cave hyena Temporal range: Middle to Late Pleistocene, 0.5–0.020 Ma PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N ↓
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

Cave hyena (Crocuta (crocuta) spelaea and Crocuta (crocuta) ultima) are extinct species or subspecies of hyena known from Eurasia, which ranged from Western Europe to eastern Asia and 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 large ungulates), 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.

Often treated as subspecies or populations of the living African spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta) to which they were closely related and heavily resembled, genetic evidence from the nuclear genome suggests that Eurasian Crocuta populations (including the west Eurasian Crocuta crocuta spelaea and Asian Crocuta crocuta ultima) were highly genetically divergent from African populations (having estimated to have split over 1 million years ago), with evidence suggested limited interbreeding between Eurasian cave and African spotted hyenas.^[1] Some authors have suggested that the two subspecies should be raised to species level as Crocuta spelaea and Crocuta ultima.^[2]

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.^[3]