Who Are Lions Main Competitors

The bad blood between lions and spotted hyenas runs deep, and is 1 of the nearly historic rivalries in nature. Their gory competition over carcasses on the African savanna has been memorialized in numerous wildlife documentaries like Beverly and Derek Joubert'south classic Eternal Enemies. "Eternal" is obviously a scrap of an overstatement – the contest betwixt the species has merely existed as long equally both have been around – merely fossil bear witness from prehistoric Europe at least partially documents how far back lions and hyenas have been snarling at each other.

Not so far into the past, during the days of the Late Pleistocene prior to 12,000 years ago, both lions and hyenas lived in Europe. Thanks to the fossil record, paleontologists have known this for the past 2 centuries. The British naturalist William Buckland made a name for himself in academic circles by teasing out the secrets of hyena-chewed basic found in Kirkdale Cavern, and in 1810 the High german paleontologist Georg August Goldfuss initially described what would come to be known as the "cave panthera leo" – Lion spelaea. (Nosotros now know that this name is a footling misleading. The lion did sometimes occupy caves, merely more often tread across the dry out grasslands and through the boreal forests of Eurasia and has been recast every bit the "steppe king of beasts.") The confrontations which take identify on the savanna of Botswana today used to exist played out on the absurd steppe of Germany, and a paper just published by paleontologist Cajus Diedrich lays out some of the evidence.

Between 1958 and 1976 a cache of about 4,000 Pleistocene mammal bones was excavated along a stretch of the Emscher River near Bottrop in w-central Frg. This collection of bones has served as window into the environmental of the area more than 37,000 years agone – bite marks and other damage to many of the basic has led Diedrich to the determination that the area was a place where hyenas violently dismantled the carcasses of their prey and raised their cubs. But lions were there, likewise.

There are two lines of evidence which place lions at the Bottrop-Wellheim site in northwest Deutschland – the basic of the animals themselves, and a rare trackway impressed with the pugmarks of a prehistoric lion. The roughly forty human foot track slab contains 29 footprints left by an adult steppe panthera leo – 12 of those being corresponding forefoot and hindfoot sets – and, since tracks are given their own genus and species names to assist organize track types, Diedrich has given this track type the name Pantheraichnus bottropensis.

The lion tracks are impressive, but the distinctive evidence of the lion'southward antagonistic encounters with hyenas is to be constitute in the bones of the big cats. Frustratingly, though, king of beasts bones are rare at the site, and poor recordkeeping has obscured the provenance of some of the bones thought to take come from the vicinity of the Bottrop quarry. (This is why notes, quarry maps, and locality information are so important in paleontology – context can be the primal to investigating the relationships betwixt prehistoric creatures and the environment they were preserved in.) Diedrich mentions a few finds from the Bottrop quarry – teeth, skull fragments, vertebrae, limb fragments, and the like – that he attributes to 1 cub, 2 adult females, and one developed male -- just he also looks at the larger sample of panthera leo remains from other open-environment sites in northern Deutschland.

Primarily citing his own work, Diedrich notes "An increasing number of lions remains, including partial skeletons, are being recognized from tardily Pleistocene hyena den sites in Central Europe." More than than that, many of the king of beasts bones show prove of existence chewed by the spotted hyenas. There are king of beasts skulls with parts cracked off, lower jaws which prove a consistent pattern of breakage, and limb bones that accept been nibbled, all of which match upwards with the specific strategies hyenas use to dismantle bodies. The feeding hyenas did non do anything special when dining on lion – the pattern of harm on the lion bones is similar to that seen on horse, rhino, and elephant basic, meaning that the hyenas stuck with their system for breaking down bodies.

But why are many damaged lion bones constitute in association with supposed hyena den sites? Diedrich proposes that the lions were killed in fights with hyenas over carcasses, and, loathe to let fresh meat get to waste, the hyenas dismembered the panthera leo bodies and carried back parts of the lion back to their dens. Alternatively, the hyenas may have only scavenged lions which died due to other reasons. Either way, hyenas actually played a role in the preservation of the lions by bringing the bones of the cats back to sites where preservation was more than likely. (The Homo erectus fossils of Dragon Os Colina in China were probably accumulated past giant hyenas in a similar fashion.) Perhaps observations of modern lions and hyenas may assist explicate which scenario was more than important in terms of panthera leo bone accumulation by hyenas. After all, king of beasts bones are occasionally found in hyena dens fifty-fifty now, and, in this case, the behavior of the living animals may act as a primal to unlocking the lives of their extinct relatives.

Tiptop Image: Tug of war - a lioness competes with hyenas for a gnu carcass in Tanzania. Photo by Flickr user kibuyu.

References:

Diedrich, C. (2011). Tardily Pleistocene steppe lion Panthera leo spelaea (Goldfuss, 1810) footprints and bone records from open air sites in northern Germany – Evidence of hyena-king of beasts antagonism and scavenging in Europe Quaternary Science Reviews, 30 (15-16), 1883-1906 DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2011.03.006