Dumb question, but how do they know it's not an escaped (or abandoned) pet? There are sadly many exotic pets on display on social media, particularly in this area of the world.

The title is clickbait. There are have not been any known confirmed spottings, but, according to the article: "However, Hofer and Mills (1998), mentioned unconfirmed records from Egypt through questionnaire surveys."

I would think that 5K is a long time for any event to occur, however unlikely. The fact that there was no confirmed spotting doesn't mean all that much to me, especially if you look back all the way into ancient history where certainly not every animal sighting was recorded.

> There are have not been any known confirmed spottings

?

from the OP:

The lone individual was caught and killed by people around 30 km from the border with Sudan, a paper in Mammalia reports.

My first reaction was disbelief until I checked the photos and videos of the remains," said the study's lead author, Dr. Abdullah Nagy from Al-Azhar University, Egypt. "Seeing the evidence, I was completely taken aback. It was beyond anything we had expected to find in Egypt."

I believe the nit misja111 was picking was that just because this was the first confirmed sighting doesn't mean other ones weren't found there in the past 5K years by people who didn't report them.

Why'd they have to kill it?

Because it was hunting their livestock.

Bigger predators and sheep/goats/etc don't mix well in general (should not be a surprise).

Protecting the rights of bigger predators over those of shepherds/farmers is something that rich nations can afford, but it still meets a lot of popular opposition (=> see wolves/brown bears in central Europe). An economically weaker nation like Egypt can not justify a move like that, especially if the animal in question is useless for tourism, too.

Don't worry too much tough, spotted Hyenas are not threatened.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2024-0031

And then it was killed. FFS

> Spotted hyenas are successful pack predators, usually found in a variety of habitats in sub-Saharan Africa. They can travel up to 27 km in a day, shadowing semi-nomadic, human-managed livestock migrations and subsisting on occasional kills.

> The individual described in this study killed two goats herded by people in Wadi Yahmib in the Elba Protected Area, and was subsequently tracked, spotted, chased and killed in late February 2024.

My first reaction was the same - then I read this and I don’t hold it against the people anymore.

It's listed as of "least concern". This one was just unusually far North.

sigh, for real..

you have it backwards. the sahara was green because the world in general was cooler back then, so the equator had weather more appropriate for the tropics. the world has gotten hotter since then, turning the region into a desert.

It's probably not so much that the world was cooler, but that it had more equable temperature. Remember Greenland was green once.

Greenland was probably once green, but we're talking several 100000 years ago, well before any humans(that we know of) appeared there.

The origin of the name is actually that Eric the Red called it that to attract settlers there. Just marketing, really.

There where warm periods, called intra-glacials in the bronze age, the late Roman, and the middle-ages.

The Sahara is on a regular-ish cycle going from green to desert about every 30k years. It's had multiple green eras. The last one is called the African humid period

Any idea, how does the dirt/each return over time to sustain plant life? Or is it just a gradual grow inwards with plant matter slowly forming topsoil?

any idea why so?

Briefly: earth‘s rotational axis had a different tilt, leading to completely different climate and weather systems behavior. Incidentally, before the green sahara period, the sahara was much larger than today.

i've read the axis precesses completing a cycle every 24,000 years, so the fraction of ocean vs land in direct sun gradually and continually changes accordingly.

...for the FIRST TIME in 5k...

Article title: "Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the FIRST TIME in 5,000 years"

Tens of thousands of years ago, spotted hyenas also lived in Europe, not only in Africa (like also lions, cheetahs, elephants, rhinoceroses and so on).

Their current territory is very restricted in comparison with the past.

Indeed, I can't imagine these will still be around in Egypt in 5000 years time as the HN post title currently suggests.

Hyenas are found all over Kenya and Tanzania, not incredibly far away. So this may be some soft of climate change thing rather than Elon trolling us.

Per the article, this is just the first recorded observation as far North as Egypt in modern times.

The only provable thing is that it was recorded, with someones phone, and then the pictures got shared. Prior to phones bieng everywhere, like last tuesday, in the area where the hyena was killed, it would happen , and never be reported outside a tiny number of people. What would be more interesting is interviewing locals in areas like this about the flora a fauna they are co-existing with. Look at the "discovery" of the ultra giant isopds that were found in sea food markets, one now named after darth vader, not kidding.Those folks went strait from catching these things from the bottom of the ocean, to eating them, no photos and social media, just grab grandmas recipie book, and try something lkely. The conection between both of these instances, is that the discussion talks over and past the actual people physicaly involved. I think that if it was practice to include and name in published papers, those non acedemic people who are there ,on the scene as it were, we would 1 have more people likely to step up and show what they know, and 2 have more entertaining information included in scientific papers, lending them more, not less credibility, and perhaps something more important in todays world,authenticity.

Depends on the particular instance. Better tools help in situations where the creature has not been seen at all in decades, as well as in situations like this where it's likely that environmental changes provided an incentive for a small number of otherwise non-extinct predators to follow their prey northward. This is a different degree of what's likely happening in central Canada, which is that elusive cougars have recently been trapped alive for the first time, appearing to occasionally migrate north from the U.S, and Grizzlies have been establishing populations near the subarctic.

> Is my billionaire prankster concept plausible? or totally implausible?

Totally implausible.

You underestimate how large the Earth is, and how little of it is intensely observed.

IIRC when you learn theory for your driver's license in Sweden, the book says "at dusk you pass an animal on the edge of the road roughly every minute". How many of those do you actually see?

Could be a Chinese lab experiment too

Title is correct: Spotted hyena is the species of hyena that was spotted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_hyena

Biologists have conjectured the existence of a competing species of unspotted hyenas, but none have ever been ... spotted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyena:

“The four extant species are the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), the brown hyena (Parahyaena brunnea), the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), and the aardwolf (Proteles cristata)”

Does anyone still need more proofs that climate change is good and benefits living beings?

Interpreting disruption as a blanket "good" is a whole ass opinion.

What fascinates me is that serious scientists are surprised that life is random anfinds a way... "However, the motivation for its extensive journey into Egypt is still a mystery that demands further research." Like, food?

They've spent lifetimes observing these animals. I wonder what they know that you and I don't.