Cairo, Egypt - A scientist in Cairo has claimed that the spotted hyena, long thought extinct in Egypt, may have returned to the country's south for the first time in about 5,000 years.

Abdullah Nagy, a zoologist at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, believes that the spotted hyena may have returned to Egypt after he saw a video of the animal.

The footage was taken by villagers who chased down and killed the hyena after it had killed two goats in the small town of Wadi Yahmib in the south of Egypt.

If verified to be footage of a spotted hyena, it would have been taken about 300 miles north of the species' natural habitat in Sudan, in a location that scientists believe it has not inhabited for the last 5,000 years.

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While striped hyenas and aardwolves can be found in Egypt, it is believed that the spotted hyena migrated south as the climate got drier.

After seeing the footage, Dr. Nagy was a bit skeptical of the footage at first and asked the colleague who had shown him the footage if they were sure it had been taken in Egypt, and not in neighboring Sudan.

"I was asking, 'Where are you actually? Because that species doesn't exist in our country," Dr. Nagy was cited as saying by the New York Times. "Are you sure that you didn't cross into Sudan or something?’"

Other scientists have disputed whether such a discovery was much of a surprise at all, because the spotted hyena is a flexible animal and a scavenger.

According to conservation biologist Andrew Jacobson of Catawba College in North Carolina, in some areas, they are outcompeting even lions, leopards, and cheetahs.

"To be honest with you, spotted hyenas cannot surprise me," said Christine Wilkinson, a carnivore ecologist and hyena specialist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the California Academy of Sciences.

"They are just incredibly behaviorally flexible animals that can make it work in all different circumstances."