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Comment by rkhassen9 | Hacker News Reader

seems like there are lots of stories like this. X creature, not seen in ages found again.

Could it be genetic engineering. Some prankster billionaires scientist wanting to repopulate the world?

Or are we just getting better at finding them with more tools. (better camera traps, drones, data mining tools with AI?)

I'm curious, does anyone know? Is my billionaire prankster concept plausible? or totally implausible?

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Hyenas are found all over Kenya and Tanzania, not incredibly far away. So this may be some soft of climate change thing rather than Elon trolling us.

Per the article, this is just the first recorded observation as far North as Egypt in modern times.

The only provable thing is that it was recorded, with someones phone, and then the pictures got shared. Prior to phones bieng everywhere, like last tuesday, in the area where the hyena was killed, it would happen , and never be reported outside a tiny number of people. What would be more interesting is interviewing locals in areas like this about the flora a fauna they are co-existing with. Look at the "discovery" of the ultra giant isopds that were found in sea food markets, one now named after darth vader, not kidding.Those folks went strait from catching these things from the bottom of the ocean, to eating them, no photos and social media, just grab grandmas recipie book, and try something lkely. The conection between both of these instances, is that the discussion talks over and past the actual people physicaly involved. I think that if it was practice to include and name in published papers, those non acedemic people who are there ,on the scene as it were, we would 1 have more people likely to step up and show what they know, and 2 have more entertaining information included in scientific papers, lending them more, not less credibility, and perhaps something more important in todays world,authenticity.

Hence why I wrote "first recorded observation".

The point being that this isn't about an animal we haven't seen recently, and so the speculations of the person I responded to about genetic engineering and the like are unwarranted.

Depends on the particular instance. Better tools help in situations where the creature has not been seen at all in decades, as well as in situations like this where it's likely that environmental changes provided an incentive for a small number of otherwise non-extinct predators to follow their prey northward. This is a different degree of what's likely happening in central Canada, which is that elusive cougars have recently been trapped alive for the first time, appearing to occasionally migrate north from the U.S, and Grizzlies have been establishing populations near the subarctic.

> Is my billionaire prankster concept plausible? or totally implausible?

Totally implausible.

You underestimate how large the Earth is, and how little of it is intensely observed.

IIRC when you learn theory for your driver's license in Sweden, the book says "at dusk you pass an animal on the edge of the road roughly every minute". How many of those do you actually see?

Could be a Chinese lab experiment too

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