Procavia antiqua

Procavia antiqua is an extinct species of hyrax that lived in South Africa during the Late Pliocene and Early Pleistocene epochs, about 3.03 million–960,000 years ago. Its fossilized remains were first discovered in Taung, and have since been found in many more caves within the country. The species was named in 1934 by Robert Broom, who recognized that it belonged in the genus Procavia, of which the only species existing today is the rock hyrax (P. capensis). Fossils of P. antiqua are very similar to the bones of the rock hyrax, differing mainly in characteristics of the teeth. Because of this, it has been proposed that P. antiqua is an ancestor of the rock hyrax or even the same species as it. If the latter case is true, this would make P. antiqua a junior synonym of P. capensis, though there remains disagreement between researchers over whether this is the case.

Being around the size of a rock hyrax, P. antiqua is one of the smaller species of its genus, and lived alongside the larger fossil species Procavia transvaalensis. The two likely avoiding direct competition by employing different feeding strategies, with the higher tooth crowns indicating that P. transvaalensis was more of a grazer, while P. antiqua was more generalist and also fed by browsing. It is believed that male P. antiqua grew larger than the females based on the width of their humeri, and the morphology of the upper incisor teeth also differed between the sexes, with those of the males having a more concave front face and a deeper ridge. A very large number of fossil specimens have been attributed to P. antiqua, many of which are skull elements, and they show a range of morphological variation, leading some experts to suggest that either more than one species is represented in this sample or that P. antiqua was more variable than modern hyraxes.

The caves which have yielded P. antiqua fossils are within a UNESCO World heritage site known as the Cradle of Humankind, so named because many specimens of early hominins have been discovered there. In at least some of these caves, the hyrax remains may have been brought in from the surrounding environment by predators such as large eagles. Analysis of the fossil content in these caves suggests that the natural environment of P. antiqua contained a forest–savanna mosaic of habitats, with the geologically older localities bearing more woodland while the younger sites would have been more dominated by grassland as the environment became drier. Large outcrops of rock were present in this environment as well, and were likely the preferred habitat of this hyrax.