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Once again, no one answered. Realising this was the staff’s entrance to the station, we groaned our way around the block to the main entrance, fingers crossed as we arrived, finally able to speak to an officer and begin to hand in the cursed wallet. However, the officer at the reception desk said words which made my heart sink: “Unfortunately, we don’t take lost property here, you would have to go to one of our other stations in town… but since they’re not open right now, just this once I’ll take the wallet from you!”
someone in need. This unfortunate situation also cemented mine and Sky’s friendship evermore, yet are still weary around each other, since together, we seem to be a beacon of bad luck!
So, the adventure was over. Stuffed away amongst the great sense of exhaustion and relief at what we’d achieved, I felt pride at the effort we’d gone to help
So, this Halloween, just hope you see one too.
I’ve seen the black cat a few times since, crawling under cars and prancing round corners, and I hope to see it again soon if it means that my otherwise uneventful life is filled, even just for a day, with some perilous adventure and luck.
By Rosie Guy
The King’s Enemies Made famous (or perhaps infamous) in ‘The Lion King’ as the antagonists alongside the dastardly lion Scar, hyenas have often found themselves the victims of both a bad reputation and taxonomic misclassification. With their outwardly canine resemblance, you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that hyenas are just large dogs. While deceptively doglike, hyenas are surprisingly more closely related to our furry feline friends, though they are still distant cousins. But if neither canine nor feline, then what exactly is a hyena? Mammalian carnivores can be split into two different groups: the Caniformia (dog-like) and the Feliformia (cat-like). Caniformia includes animals like dogs, bears, and seals, while Feliformia includes cats, mongooses, and hyenas. Within Feliformia, we find that hyenas have been given their own family, the Hyaenidae. The evolutionary history of hyenas is fascinating in its own right. A relatively recent entrant to the mammals, hyenas first arose around 20 million years ago, splitting off from a civet-like ancestor and then forming two distinct lineages: dog-like and bone-crushing. The dog-like hyenas experienced as rapid an extinction as they did diversification, ironically due to being outcompeted by ancestral canids in the face of a changing climate. The bone-crushers fared somewhat better, adapting to the presence of competitors by carving out a new niche largely as scavengers. Today, the once-flourishing Hyaenidae is one of the smallest mammal groups, represented by just four living species. The chart below, called a cladogram, highlights the evolutionary relationships between today’s hyena species and was constructed using a mitochondrial gene called cytochrome oxidase I. This gene is often used in genetics work because it is generally good at distinguishing different species as it evolves relatively fast compared to other genes. Recent work using complete hyena genomes also agrees with this version of events.
