“We simply don’t have sufficient related crania and postcrania to make sure,” Werdelin says. With out our bodies to compare the fossil skulls, in different phrases, it’s tough to understand whether or not Bastetodon and different hyaenodonts chased down their foods like wolves do, ambushed their prey like cats, or did one thing solely other. The explanation why hyaenodonts disappeared may be unknown.The earliest hyaenodonts developed greater than 56 million years in the past, all over the time Earth was once getting better from the asteroid-driven mass extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs and heat, humid forests unfold over the planet. Hyaenodonts have been a number of the maximum standard, prolific, and every now and then biggest predators in their time. Their anatomy was once distinctive, however they stuffed ecological roles corresponding to what cats, canine, hyenas, and bears would in the end evolve into.It can be that the evolution of the ones extra acquainted carnivores ended in the decline of hyaenodonts.On the identical time Bastetodon was once prowling the forests of prehistoric Egypt, the carnivore lineages that come with cats and hyenas in a single crew, and canine, bears, and pinnipeds within the different, had already break up. Early cats and canine have been starting to diversify and unfold into new environments via 30 million years in the past, taking small prey because the hyaenodonts all for higher fare.
