Identify: Aardwolf (Proteles cristatus)The place it lives: Savannah and grasslands in japanese and southern AfricaWhat it eats: Termites and antsWhy it is superior: Not like their meat-eating kin, those solitary, nocturnal little hyenas live to tell the tale on a nutrition nearly solely made up of termites. They may be able to gobble as much as 300,000 of the bugs each evening, the usage of their sticky, super-long tongues to lap them up. Aardwolf tongues are vast and rounded, with large, hardened papillae, or the bumps at the tongue that include style buds. The sand they lap up with the termites is helping the hyenas’ digestion.Because of this specialised nutrition, aardwolves have flattened, peg-like enamel that may’t bite meat. Whilst the animals nonetheless have fangs, in contrast to their meat-eating opposite numbers, they just use them to protect their territory and cubs. Similar: Siberian cave full of mammoth, rhino and endure bones is historical hyena lairGet the sector’s most enticing discoveries delivered directly in your inbox.Aardwolves, which interprets as “earth wolves” in Afrikaans, are the smallest of the 4 hyena species, measuring 22 to 31 inches (55 to 80 centimeters) lengthy and as much as 20 inches (50 cm) tall. Not like noticed hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) and striped hyenas (Hyaena hyaena), aardwolves do not reside in packs and handiest come in combination to mate and rear younger.This lonely way of life additionally stems from their style for termites. They spend many hours licking up termites every evening, and this foraging-based nutrition is not fitted to team residing. 
An aardwolf doggy photographed at the Kapama Recreation Reserve in South Africa. (Symbol credit score: AlaimageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG / Alamy Inventory Photomy)Scientists don’t seem to be positive how aardwolves first advanced. The species’ whole departure from its residing kin and extinct ancestors approach it is a “ghost lineage,” in step with a 2022 remark from Berkeley Information. The species is thought to have emerged about 15 million years in the past, in line with genetic divergence from different hyena species, however the earliest fossils corresponding to the species date to simply 4 million years in the past.Then again, fossils unearthed in China relationship again 12 to fifteen million years in the past published an extinct species of hyena — Gansuyaena megalotis — that had additionally evolved a termite-eating nutrition. Whilst now not an immediate ancestor of aardwolves, the invention is helping to fill the gaps in our figuring out of the way those atypical hyenas got here to be. “With those fossils, we will truly begin to get on the query, ‘how does an another way very specialised lineage for dining meat have a member, a peculiar cousin, that began down this absolutely other trail of changing into a specialised insectivore, a termite specialist?'” learn about co-author Jack Tseng, assistant professor of integrative biology on the College of California, stated within the remark. “Now, we’ve got the place to begin and finishing level, which is lately. Your next step is to determine what came about within the intervening 10 million years of this lineage.”
