Moscow-Sana
Russian archaeologists have found a giant fossil hyena skull and other animal bones in Tavrida Cave in the Crimea.
And the Russia Today website quoted the media office of the Crimean Federal University as saying in a statement that “members of the scientific expedition of the university and the Russian Academy of Sciences discovered for the first time in Europe the almost complete skull of a fossil hyena of the type (Bashikrokota) with the sword canine of a cat of the feline family.”
Researcher Dmitry Gemranov from the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences said, "The hyena with which the discovered skull belongs occupies an intermediate evolutionary position between late European hyenas and older Asian hyenas. Thanks to this discovery, we will be able to determine the position of the ancient hyena in Crimea in a tree. The evolution of the Eurasian hyena, "noting that the complete sword canine of a cat is about 10 centimeters long and will allow correcting the list of sword-toothed predators in Eastern Europe in the early Pleistocene 1.8 to 0.8 million years ago."
According to Gimranov, archaeologists in Europe had not previously found a complete skull and teeth for such a hyena, while in Russia a similar skull was found in the area beyond the Baikal and two skulls in China.
