This carnivore turned up in Egypt after vanishing 5,000 years ago

The animal killed two goats belonging to residents of Wadi Yahmib, a village within the sparsely populated Elba Protected Area of Egypt. To protect their livestock, the villagers chased down the carnivore in a pickup truck and killed it.

When Abdullah Nagy, a zoologist at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, received a video of the hunt from a colleague who was in the region, he thought he was being pranked.

"I was asking, 'Where are you actually? Because that species doesn't exist in our country,'" Nagy said. "'Are you sure that you didn't cross into Sudan or something?'"

Additional photos offered persuasive proof: A spotted hyena had crossed into Egypt, about 300 miles north of the nearest known population of the animals in Sudan. The observation of the hyena is the first record of the oft-misunderstood mammal in Egypt in 5,000 years.

Two other hyena species -- the striped hyena and the aardwolf -- can be found in Egypt. But spotted hyenas went extinct in the country millenniums ago as the regional climate became dryer and more arid. Warthogs and zebras also disappeared from Egypt at this time.

Nagy, Said El-Kholy and two other colleagues published details of the encounter in the journal Mammalia last month.

While Nagy said the hyena sighting left him in "disbelief," Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist and hyena specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the California Academy of Sciences, wasn't fazed in the slightest.

"To be honest with you, spotted hyenas cannot surprise me," she said. "They are just incredibly behaviorally flexible animals that can make it work in all different circumstances."

Spotted hyenas have a reputation for being scavengers, but they actually hunt most of the food they eat themselves. They live in large, complex matriarchal societies called clans, which are similar to the social groups of some primates like baboons. Adept problem solvers, they can make do on a diet of caterpillars or prey on baby elephants, Wilkinson said.

Some even live among people, as they do in Harar, an Ethiopian city where they are fed and revered by locals.

Spotted hyenas are the largest of the four living hyena species and are found throughout sub-Saharan Africa; in regions where other big predators on the continent are struggling, the hyenas seem to be holding firm.

"What we're discovering is that the spotted hyenas are doing really quite well, probably better than the other large carnivores" like lions, leopards and cheetahs, said Andrew Jacobson, a conservation biologist at Catawba College in North Carolina.

That seemed to be reflected in Nagy and his colleagues' research. To figure out how the hyena might have made the journey into Egypt, they analysed satellite images of the vegetation in the area. They found that the region, normally dry and forbidding, has been in a recent wet period, which has led to more plant growth and, potentially, more herbivores like gazelles for hyenas to hunt.

Jacobson, Wilkinson and other colleagues are working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature to update a spotted hyena range map. The team hopes to submit the new map for publication sometime this year, Jacobson said.

Though some spotties, as Wilkinson calls them, are doing well, others seem to be struggling. Jacobson said there are possible declines of the hyenas in parts of west and central Africa.

One of the biggest threats to the animals is conflict with humans, as the fate of the Egyptian hyena shows. When hyenas kill livestock, Wilkinson said, people often feel that they have to kill them to protect their livelihoods.

"They can't take the risk to lose their one cow or their small herd of goats to hyenas," she added. "It's a very complicated issue."

Though this spottie's trip to Egypt had an abrupt end, the animal will live on, in a way, in the country. When Nagy first learned that the hyena had been killed, he asked people in Wadi Yahmib to bury it to protect it from decomposing. He hopes to travel to the village next month to collect the skeleton and bring it back to his university's museum for study.

"I wouldn't be able to dissect it, because it will be decayed," Nagy said. "The skeleton itself would provide very valuable insights."