Egypt's rare wildlife makes headlines in the int’l press

In pleasantly non-conflict related news, a spotted hyena showing up in Egypt after a 5k-year absence is putting Egypt under the limelight, with the New York Times picking up the story. The first sighting of a spotted hyena in Egypt — in the Gebel Elba area to the north of our borders with Sudan — in five millennia was very brief as local villagers killed the spotty animal after it attacked their livestock. The sighting was so unexpected that Abdullah Nagy, a zoologist at Al Azhar University in Cairo, initially thought he was being pranked when he received a video of the animal.

The NYT's coverage examines the scientific significance of the discovery: The publication reports that while Egypt is home to striped hyenas and aardwolves, spotted hyenas had disappeared from the country thousands of years ago as the climate became more arid. Recent wet periods in the typically dry region may have created conditions that allowed the hyena to venture some 300 miles north of its nearest known population in Sudan, according to Nagy and his colleagues, who published their findings in the journal Mammalia.