SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : HYENA'S EGYPT

Spotted Once Again : 5,000 years later - a hyena returns to Egypt : The animal killed two goats belonging to residents of Wadi Yahmib, a village within the sparsely populated Elba Protected Area of Egypt.

To protect their livestock, the villagers chased down the carnivore in a pickup truck and killed it.

When Abdulla Nagy, a zoologist at AL-Azhar University in Cairo, received a video of the hunt from a colleague who was in the region, he thought he was being pranked.

'' I was asking : ' Where are you actually? Because that species doesn't exist in our country, ' '' Dr. Nagy said. '' Are you sure that you didn't cross into Sudan or something? ' ''

Additional photos offered persuasive proof : A spotted hyena had crossed into Egypt, 300 miles [ 480 kilometers north ] of the nearest known population of the animals in Sudan.

The sighting is the first record of the oft-misunderstood mammal in Egypt in 5,000 years.

Two other hyena species - the striped hyena and the aardwolf - can be found in Egypt. But spotted hyenas were extinct in the country millenniums ago as the regional climate became dryer and more arid.

Warthogs and zebras also disappeared from Egypt at this time.

The World Students Society thanks Darren Incorvala.