Throughout history, few animals have been more befuddling than the hyena. This is a critter, after all, that famously laughs just like us, and according to the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, can call us by name, then proceed to slaughter us when we emerge from our homes. Even our pets aren’t safe from the hyena, for “when its shadow falls on dogs they are struck dumb,” Pliny writes.

Most confusing of all, though, are the hyena’s genitals. Indeed, Pliny says, the critter is “popularly believed to be bisexual and to become male and female in alternate years.” In Aesop’s fable “The Hyenas,” they “change their sex each year.” Even Ernest Hemingway called the hyena a “hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of the dead, trailer of calving cows, ham-stringer, potential biter-off of your face at night while you slept.” Sick burn, Ernest.

The root of all this sexual mythologizing? Well, it turns out that female hyenas have extremely enlarged half-foot-long clitorises that look almost perfectly like penises, complete with what appear to be testicles, which actually are their labia that have folded up and fused. They even get erections. Oh, also, they give birth to a two-pound cub out of the enormous clitoris.

Here, take a look at these adorable cubs. This article is going to get a bit heavy. Image: Wikimedia

However, contrary to what Ernest might have thought, this is not hermaphroditism. Males and females have distinct genetics and reproductive organs, the female's highly modified clitoris notwithstanding. Which raises the question: Why would such a thing develop?

One idea is that it might have something to do with the hyenas' unusual social lives. Female spotted hyenas can be 10 percent larger than males, and unlike in most social carnivorous mammals, it’s the female who’s the hyper-aggressive ruler of the clan, leading hunts and asserting her dominance over males. One study found that the more dominant the female, the more she doses her fetuses with high levels of the hormone androgen, which makes them more aggressive and therefore better able to fight for food in a clan of up to 80 individuals.

It was once thought that it was this androgen that caused the runaway growth of the clitoris. But when researchers fed pregnant hyenas drugs that blocked the production of androgen, the female offspring still developed enlarged clitorises.

The medieval Aberdeen Bestiary's depiction of the hyena and its, uh, naughty bits. Image: Wikimedia

While the bizarre genitals thus aren't simply a side effect of the androgen, they certainly evolved for a reason. One hypothesis argues that with such a long reproductive tract, it takes far longer for sperm to reach their destination, buying the female time to urinate to flush out the sperm if she wasn’t all that into the male after all–sexual selection at its finest. (What the high levels of androgen are likely doing, by the way, is causing males to begin mounting females at a younger age. Scientists think that this is because–and I’m being serious here–males need the practice to be able to insert their erect penis into the female’s placid sorta-penis.)

The hyena's eating habits, too, have been the source of misplaced revulsion. Sixteenth-century naturalist Conrad Gesner claimed hyenas gorge themselves so thoroughly that they must force themselves between two trees or boulders to squeeze their meals out of both ends. Incorrect, to be sure, but the hyena will in fact eat pretty much anything it can get its teeth on. It’s the garbage disposal of Africa, chewing through bones and horns and hooves. And while it’s long been painted as a no-good, dirty scavenger, the spotted hyena is an adept predator that kills up to 95 percent of the food it eats.

Such unfair maligning of the hyena goes back 2,000 years to Pliny’s fanciful description of the creature as having “certain magic arts by which it causes every animal at which it gazes three times to stand rooted to the spot.” It didn’t help the hyena’s image any that in the centuries after Pliny, the Middle Ages’ bestiaries–encyclopedias of creatures both real and imagined–seemed to go out of their way to paint the creatures as brutal thugs and sexual deviants.

The Aberdeen Bestiary's depiction of the crocotta, with 100 percent less genitals than the bestiary's illustration of the mythical creature's inspiration, the hyena. Image: Wikimedia

One medieval bestiary noted that since hyenas are “neither male nor female, they are neither faithful nor pagan,” and are obviously not to be trusted. With their one-of-a-kind sex, hyenas were used in such bestiaries to illustrate the evils of homosexuality. (These authors had no way of knowing it, but homosexual behavior has been observed in all kinds of species, from dolphins to penguins to certain homophobic politicians.)

It’s the kind of brutal reputation that even today the hyena is still having trouble shaking off, thanks in no small part to contemporary portrayals of it as a wretched beast in movies like The Lion King. (Also, contrary to what Disney says, hyenas can’t speak like humans that well.)

For thousands of years we’ve had the hyena all wrong. So the next time you see a hyena, say you’re sorry. It may seem like it’s laughing back at you, but thank your lucky stars it isn’t calling your name and dragging you out of your house, then casting its shadow on the family dog.

Image: Chris Eason/Flickr