Ancient DNA Analyses of the Spotted Hyena (Crocuta crocuta) from Lingxian Cave, Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province

The extant hyena species are the remnants of a formerly diverse group of Hyaenidae, which reached its peak about 5 MYA and contained more than 100 fossil species. Hyenas have been the subject of a number of evolutionary and systematic studies during the last two centuries, due in large part to the dramatical loss of its diversity and geography. The phylogenetic studies incorporating both morphological and molecular analysis have yielded different conclusions regarding the evolutionary relationship between extant and extinct hyenas. In this study, partial ancient DNA sequence of cytochrome b gene in mitochondrial genome was successfully retrieved from Pleistocene hyena bones collected from Hebei Province in North China. The BLAST result shows that the cracked specimen is the teeth of a spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), which makes the classification of the specimen clear at the molecular level. Furthermore, both the obtained sequence and the homologous sequences extracted from GenBank were aligned and used as datasets for phylogenetic analyses. The phylogenetic tree shows that the two individuals from China and the one from Russia were joined together, appearing as a sister group of the branch combined by the west European fossils and the African extant hyenas, which suggests a phylogeographic pattern of the Pleistocene cave hyenas.