A team of scientists detailed how an ancient cave hyena was extremely threatening and unafraid to take on prey much than itself.
According to Live Science, the predatory cat was able to best a five-year-old mastodon on its own, even though it weighed upward of a ton. But when the hyena was with its pack, the group was capable of preying on mastodons a that were a few years older and another ton heavier.
Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the new study details how "hypercarnivores" attacked prey much larger than they were.
"Large herbivores are not merely victims of the circumstances they live in, but actively engineer their environment. This has major consequences for other species, and for the structure of the entire landscape," study lead author Liesbeth Bakker, from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology, said in a press release. "Acknowledging the major ecosystem-engineering role of large herbivores, you can't imagine that vegetation stayed the same regardless of their presence or absence in the Late Pleistocene."
The researchers found that hypercarnivores - the cave hyena and sabertooth tiger - helped control populations of megaherbivores like elephants. When left unchecked, those large plant eaters, which are pretty imposing to potential predators, tend to disrupt their habitat's vegetation by grazing too much.
"Scientists didn't really understand how much bigger some of these Pleistocene predators were than modern ones," study lead author Blaire Van Valkenburgh, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told Live Science. "The group sizes of predators were considerably larger in the past than they are today, which would have made it easier for them to take down large prey."
