The aardwolf, a peculiar relative of the hyena, boasts peg-like teeth and an insect-only diet, presenting an evolutionary enigma from an elusive lineage that scientists are still unraveling.
#### Aardwolf (Proteles cristatus) **Habitat:** Savannah and grasslands in eastern and southern Africa **Diet:** Termites and ants
Unlike their carnivorous relatives, these nocturnal and solitary hyenas thrive on a diet almost exclusively of termites, consuming up to 300,000 every night. Their sticky, elongated tongues are adapted to lap up termites efficiently, aided by hardened papillae that facilitate digestion.
Thanks to this specialized diet, aardwolves have flattened teeth unsuitable for chewing meat. While they retain fangs, these are only used for defense rather than feeding. Their unique dietary habits contribute to their solitary nature, as their foraging lifestyle does not support group living.
Aardwolves, meaning “earth wolves” in Afrikaans, are the smallest of the four hyena species, measuring 22 to 31 inches (55 to 80 centimeters) in length and up to 20 inches (50 cm) in height. Unlike their pack-living relatives, aardwolves come together only to mate and rear their young.
Scientists are uncertain about the aardwolf’s evolutionary history. Despite diverging from other hyena species around 15 million years ago, the earliest aardwolf-like fossils date back only 4 million years. This gap makes the species part of a “ghost lineage.”
However, fossils of an extinct hyena species, Gansuyaena megalotis, dating back 12 to 15 million years ago, suggest a termite-eating diet similar to that of aardwolves. This discovery in China provides clues about the evolution of these unique insectivorous hyenas.
“With these fossils, we can start to understand how a lineage specialized for eating meat developed a member that became a specialized insectivore,” said Jack Tseng, assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of California. “Now, we have the starting point and the ending point. The next step is to figure out what happened in the intervening 10 million years of this lineage.”
These insights help us understand the fascinating evolutionary journey of the aardwolf, a true anomaly among hyenas.
