This Carnivore Turned Up in Egypt After Vanishing 5,000 Years Ago

When a scientist received a video of a spotted hyena in the southern part of his country, he thought someone was playing a trick on him.

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,’” Dr. 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.

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