Both eat food quickly and may store it, and their calloused feet with large, blunt, nonretractable claws are adapted for running and making sharp turns.

The lineage of Plioviverrops prospered, and gave rise to descendants with longer legs and more pointed jaws, a direction similar to that taken by canids in North America.

Although the dog-like hyenas thrived 15 million years ago (with one taxon having colonised North America), they became extinct after a change in climate, along with the arrival of canids into Eurasia.

The decline of the dog-like hyenas began 5–7 million years ago during a period of climate change, exacerbated by canids crossing the Bering land bridge to Eurasia.

Chasmaporthetes managed to survive for some time in North America by deviating from the endurance-running and bone-crushing niches monopolized by canids, and developing into a cheetah-like sprinter.

By 5 million years ago, the bone-crushing hyenas had become the dominant scavengers of Eurasia, primarily feeding on large herbivore carcasses felled by sabre-toothed cats.

[8][7] Starting in the early Middle Pleistocene Pachycrocuta was replaced by the smaller Crocuta and Hyena, which corresponds to a general faunal change, perhaps in connection to the Mid-Pleistocene transition.

[12] Ancestral spotted hyenas probably developed social behaviours in response to increased pressure from rivals on carcasses, thus forcing them to operate in teams.

Spotted hyenas evolved sharp carnassials behind their crushing premolars, therefore they did not need to wait for their prey to die, and thus became pack hunters as well as scavengers.

[7] Spotted hyenas spread from their original homeland during the Middle Pleistocene, and quickly colonised a very wide area from Europe, to southern Africa and China.

[12] The eventual disappearance of the spotted hyena from Europe has traditionally been attributed to the end of the last glacial period and a subsequent displacement of open grassland by closed forests, which favoured wolves and humans instead.

[13] However, analyses have shown that climate change alone is insufficient to explain the spotted hyena's disappearance from Europe, suggesting that other factors – such as human pressure – must have played a role.

[14] This suggests that the events must be seen within the broader context of late-Quaternary extinctions, as the late Pleistocene and early Holocene saw the disappearance of many primarily large mammals from Europe and the world.

Expansion or duplication of the olfatory receptor gene family has been found in all 4 extant species, which would have led to the evolution of the more specialised feeding habits of hyenas.

[17] The percrocutids are, in contrast to McKenna and Bell's classification, not included as a subfamily into the Hyaenidae, but as the separate family Percrocutidae (though they are generally grouped as sister-taxa to hyenas[18]).

[19] The following cladogram illustrates the phylogenetic relationships between extant and extinct hyaenids based on the morphological analysis by Werdelin & Solounias (1991),[27] as updated by Turner et al.

[37][38] The spotted hyena is renowned for its strong bite proportional to its size, but a number of other animals (including the Tasmanian devil) are proportionately stronger.

[38] The spotted hyena is very vocal, producing a number of different sounds consisting of whoops, grunts, groans, lows, giggles, yells, growls, laughs and whines.

[52] The spotted hyena, though it also scavenges occasionally, is an active pack hunter of medium to large sized ungulates, which it catches by wearing them down in long chases and dismembering them in a canid-like manner.

[53] The aardwolf is primarily an insectivore, specialised for feeding on termites of the genus Trinervitermes and Hodotermes, which it consumes by licking them up with its long, broad tongue.

[54] Spotted hyenas are one of the few mammals other than bats known to survive infection with rabies virus[55] and have shown little or no disease-induced mortality during outbreaks in sympatric carnivores, in part due to the high concentration of antibodies present in their saliva.

In West African tales, spotted hyenas are sometimes depicted as bad Muslims who challenge the local animism that exists among the Beng in Côte d’Ivoire.

[60] al-Damīrī in his writings in Ḥawayān al-Kubrā (1406) wrote that striped hyenas were vampiric creatures that attacked people at night and sucked the blood from their necks.

[63] In a similar vein to al-Damīrī, the Greeks until the end of the 19th century believed that the bodies of werewolves, if not destroyed, would haunt battlefields as vampiric hyenas that drank the blood of dying soldiers.

Though the Authorized King James Version of the Bible interprets the term "`ayit tsavua`" (found in Jeremiah 12:9) as "speckled bird", Henry Baker Tristram argued that it was most likely a hyena being mentioned.

[65] The vocalization of the spotted hyena resembling hysterical human laughter has been alluded to in numerous works of literature: "to laugh like a hyæna" or a "hyen" was a common simile, and is featured in The Cobbler's Prophecy (1594), Webster's Duchess of Malfi (1623) and Shakespeare's As You Like It, Act IV.

[citation needed][66][67] Die Strandjutwolf (The brown hyena) is an allegorical poem by the renowned South African poet, N. P. van Wyk Louw, which evokes a sinister and ominous presence.

[76] A 1903 report describes spotted hyenas in the Mzimba district of Angoniland waiting at dawn outside people's huts to attack them when they opened their doors.

Attacks occurred most commonly in September, when people slept outdoors and bush fires made the hunting of wild game difficult for the hyenas.

[86][87] This practice dates back to the times of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, who believed that different parts of the hyena's body were effective means to ward off evil and to ensure love and fertility.