The “American hyena” is a name for a strange, hyena-like predator reported in the northern Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Its best-known form is the shunka warak’in, and unlike most cryptids, there is a body: a mounted animal shot in Montana in the 1880s, displayed for decades as a “ringdocus,” lost, and rediscovered in 2007.[1][2] North America really did once have hyenas, but they died out long before any people arrived.
| Other names | Shunka warak’in, ringdocus, guyasticutus, “Rocky Mountain hyaena” |
|---|---|
| Region | Northern Plains and Rocky Mountains; the specimen is from Montana’s Madison Valley |
| Physical evidence | One mounted specimen (1880s), now at the Madison Valley History Museum, Ennis, Montana |
| DNA tested | Not the mount itself as of the latest reports; a similar animal shot in 2018 was a gray wolf |
| Real fossil hyenas | Chasmaporthetes, extinct in North America roughly 1–0.5 million years ago |
The name shunka warak’in
The cryptozoologist Loren Coleman linked the Montana specimen to a creature he called the shunka warak’in, a name usually translated as “carries off dogs,” which he associated with the Ioway and other Native peoples of the northern Plains. Coleman and Mark A. Hall collected accounts of hyena-like beasts in North America in a 1996 Fortean Times article.[1][2] How well the name and its traditions are documented in Native sources themselves is unclear, so this link should be treated as Coleman’s interpretation.
The Hutchins specimen
The story of the specimen was told by the entomologist and writer Ross E. Hutchins in his 1977 book Trails to Nature’s Mysteries. In the 1880s his grandfather, Israel Ammon Hutchins, a settler in Montana’s Madison River valley, shot a strange, wolf-like animal near his homestead. According to family accounts he first missed it and killed one of his own cows, before finally killing the animal.[1][2]
The body was traded to Joseph Sherwood, who ran a store and small museum near Henrys Lake, Idaho. Sherwood had it mounted and displayed it as a “ringdocus.” A display label also called it a “guyasticutus” and a “Rocky Mountain hyaena.”[1][2]
The mount disappeared around 1980. In 2007 Jack Kirby, another grandson of Israel Hutchins, found it in storage at the Idaho Museum of Natural History in Pocatello. It was loaned to the Madison Valley History Museum in Ennis, Montana, where it is on display.[1][2]
A clue in the label: the “guyasticutus”
One of the names on Sherwood’s display is a strong hint that he was having some fun. The gyascutus (spelled many ways, including guyascutus) was a famous American joke animal. It was usually described as a lopsided beast with legs shorter on one side, so it could walk only one way around a hill, and it was a staple of lumber-camp tall tales from before the Civil War. It also gave its name to a well-known con. In 1845, newspapers in the Midwest reported two Yankee showmen touring with a “gyascutus” exhibition. Customers paid to sit in a darkened hall and saw only hooves under a curtain. At a signal there was a roar and a crash, the showman shouted that the beast had escaped, and in the panic the pair slipped away with the takings. By the late nineteenth century, “hunting the gyascutus” was slang for a fool’s errand.[6]
A frontier storekeeper labeling his odd mount a “guyasticutus” was almost certainly winking at his customers. The animal was real, but the presentation was part sideshow. That context matters when we read the label as evidence.
The DNA question
Many websites say DNA testing proved the “American hyena” was a wolf. That is not quite right. In May 2018 a rancher near Denton, Montana, shot an unusual wolf-like animal, prompting comparisons with the shunka warak’in. Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks tested that animal at its lab in Bozeman and announced in June 2018 that it was an ordinary female gray wolf.[1][2]
The Hutchins mount itself had not been DNA-tested as of those reports, partly because of questions about which museum could authorize sampling.[2] Photographs show a dark canid with a sloping back and a somewhat hyena-like look, which most observers consider consistent with an unusual wolf, a wolf-dog hybrid or a wolf mounted poorly by a nineteenth-century taxidermist.
The 2018 Denton wolf in detail
The animal shot near Denton on 16 May 2018 was a two- or three-year-old female, killed by a rancher in a private pasture near his livestock. Photographs showed something that looked “off” for a wolf, and the comparisons to the shunka warak’in followed quickly. After examining it at their lab and running DNA tests, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks described it as “a relatively normal-looking wolf” with a few unusual features: shorter legs, front claws and canine teeth than typical, and larger ears. A US Fish and Wildlife Service geneticist, Mary Curtis, pointed out that this kind of variation within a species is not unusual.[7]
The Denton wolf was a useful real-world test. An animal that looked strange enough to revive a cryptid legend turned out, under examination, to be an ordinary member of a known species with some individual quirks. It would not be surprising if the Hutchins mount, if it is ever sampled, turned out the same way.
Did North America have hyenas?
Yes, in the deep past. Chasmaporthetes, a long-legged “hunting hyena,” lived in North America during the Pliocene and early Pleistocene. It is the only hyena known to have crossed into the Americas, and it died out somewhere between about a million and half a million years ago, long before people arrived. Some cryptozoologists have suggested the shunka warak’in might be a survivor, but there is no fossil evidence of hyenas in North America anywhere near the time of human settlement.
The fossil record of North American hyenas got a surprising addition in 2019. Two fossil teeth collected in the 1970s along the Old Crow River in Canada’s northern Yukon, and stored for decades in the Canadian Museum of Nature, were identified by Jack Tseng and colleagues as belonging to Chasmaporthetes. They are the first hyena fossils ever found in the Arctic, probably about 1.4 million to 850,000 years old. They confirm that hyenas crossed from Asia into North America through Beringia and spread as far south as Mexico. The earliest North American hyena fossils are about 5 million years old, and the group vanished from the continent between roughly one million and half a million years ago. One idea is that the giant short-faced bear took over their bone-crushing, scavenging role.[8]
Possible explanations
- Gray wolves. Wolves vary widely in color and build, and an unusual individual can look strange, especially when out of context or poorly mounted. The 2018 Denton animal shows how easily this happens.
- Wolf-dog hybrids. Settlers’ dogs and wild wolves sometimes interbred, producing animals with odd proportions.
- Taxidermy. Nineteenth-century mounts were often built on crude forms, and a sloping back or odd head can be the taxidermist’s work rather than the animal’s.
- A surviving hyena. The cryptozoological option, with no supporting evidence.
For other out-of-place predators, see Alien Big Cats and the Adjule, a mystery wild dog of the Sahara.
References
- “The Shunka Warak’in, Hyena of the Rockies,” Distinctly Montana.
- Karl Shuker, “Shunka warak’in, ringdocus, guyasticutus, Rocky Mountain hyaena – a tangle of terms for a very taxing taxiderm beast,” ShukerNature (2018). Blog post.
- Ross E. Hutchins, Trails to Nature’s Mysteries (1977).
- Loren Coleman and Mark A. Hall, article on hyena-like beasts of North America, Fortean Times (June 1996).
- “Mystery monster returns home after 121 years,” Bozeman Daily Chronicle (2007).
- “Before Big Foot, the Mysterious Gyascutus of Vermont,” New England Historical Society.
- “Tests confirm mystery animal shot in Montana was a wolf,” Associated Press, 20 June 2018, via Global News.
- Z. J. Tseng, G. Zazula and L. Werdelin, “First Fossils of Hyenas (Chasmaporthetes, Hyaenidae, Carnivora) from North of the Arctic Circle,” Open Quaternary 5 (2019); see the University at Buffalo news release (18 June 2019).
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from documented sources. An earlier version described the American hyena as standing 3–4 feet at the shoulder with glowing eyes and bone-crushing jaws, and attributed hyena stories to unspecified Native and settler traditions. These details were not supported and have been replaced. The illustration above is an artistic impression.