![]() ![]() Living hyenas are infamous for crushing the bones of their prey to extract the nutritious marrow inside. This combination of traits suggests that bone-crushing Borophagus potentially hunted in collaborative social groups and occupied a niche no longer present in North American ecosystems. parvus body weight of ~24 kg, reaching sizes of obligatory large-prey hunters and (5) prey size ranging ~35–100 kg. Surface morphology, micro-CT analyses, and contextual information reveal (1) droppings in concentrations signifying scent-marking behavior, similar to latrines used by living social carnivorans (2) routine consumption of skeletons (3) undissolved bones inside coprolites indicating gastrointestinal similarity to modern striped and brown hyenas (4) B. We report rare coprolites (fossilized feces) of Borophagus parvus from the late Miocene of California and, for the first time, describe unambiguous evidence that these predatory canids ingested large amounts of bone. Borophagine canids have long been hypothesized to be North American ecological ‘avatars’ of living hyenas in Africa and Asia, but direct fossil evidence of hyena-like bone consumption is hitherto unknown. ![]()
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