21 June 2010. Berkeley, California
I am spending some time studying hyenas and lions in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) at the University of California, Berkeley, just before the start of our 2010 fieldwork season in China.
The MVZ has a unique collection of African carnivores, especially those of spotted hyenas. Fieldwork conducted by researcher Lawrence Frank in Kenya and Tanzania in the 1970s onward involved the collection of dozens of spotted hyena specimens from those areas, establishing a "time slice" of those populations, and providing valuable data for morphologists and paleontologists studying past populations of spotted hyenas and their ancestors.
[spotted hyena mandibles laid out on the counter for study]
~Jack
