Spotted Hyena - Etymology, Discovery and Naming

Etymology, Discovery and Naming

The spotted hyena's scientific name Crocuta, was once widely thought to be derived from the Latin loanword crocutus, which translates as "saffron-coloured one", in reference to the animal's fur colour. This was proven to be incorrect, as the correct spelling of the loanword would have been Crocāta, and the word was never used in that sense by Graeco-Roman sources. Crocuta actually comes from the Greek word Κροκόττας (Krokottas), which is derived from the Sanskrit koṭṭhâraka, which in turn originates from kroshṭuka (both of which were originally meant to signify the golden jackal). The earliest recorded mention of Κροκόττας is from Strabo's Geographica, where the animal is described as a mix of wolf and dog native to Ethiopia.

From antiquity till the Renaissance, the spotted and striped hyena were either assumed to be the same species, or distinguished purely on geographical, rather than physical grounds. Hiob Ludolf, in his Historia aethiopica, was the first to clearly distinguish the Crocuta from Hyaena on account of physical, as well as geographical grounds, though he never had any first hand experience of the species, having gotten his accounts from an Ethiopian intermediary. Confusion still persisted over the exact taxonomic nature of the hyena family in general, with most European travelers in Ethiopia referring to hyenas as "wolves". This partly stems from the Amharic word for hyena, ጅብ (djibb), which derives from the Arabic word ذئب (dhi'b), meaning "wolf".

The first detailed first-hand descriptions of the spotted hyena by Europeans come from Willem Bosman and Peter Kolben. Bosman, a Dutch tradesman who worked for the Dutch West India Company at the Gold Coast (modern day Ghana) from 1688–1701, wrote of "Jakhals, of Boshond" (jackals or woodland dogs) whose physical descriptions match the spotted hyena. Kolben, a German mathematician and astronomer who worked for the Dutch East India Company in the Cape of Good Hope from 1705–1713, described the spotted hyena in great detail, but referred to it as a "Tigerwolf", because the settlers in southern Africa did not know of hyenas, and thus labelled them as "wolves".

Bosman and Kolben's descriptions went largely unnoticed until in 1771, when the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, in his Synopsis of Quadrupeds, used the descriptions, as well as his personal experience with a captive specimen, as a basis for consistently differentiating the spotted hyena from the striped. The description given by Pennant was precise enough to be included by Johann Erxleben in his Systema regni animalis by simply translating Pennant's text into Latin. Crocuta was finally recognised as a separate genus from Hyaena in 1828.