Cave bear mummy discovered in Siberia still has its internal organs, fur and black nose

[left-of-center2012]

(Until the adult cave bear mummy was discovered, "only skulls and bones were found)

Reindeer hunters in Siberia have unearthed the remains of an extinct ice age beast: a mummified cave bear — the only adult of its species ever discovered that still has intact soft tissues, including its fur and even its black nose, according to news reports. The hunters found the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) mummy on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky island, in the East Siberian Sea. Meanwhile, on the mainland in the Republic of Sakha (also known as Yakutia), another group discovered the mummy of a cave bear cub, according to a statement from the North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk.

"This is the first and only find of its kind — a whole bear carcass with soft tissues," Lena Grigorieva, a molecular paleontologist at NEFU, said in the statement, referring to the mummy found on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky island. "It is completely preserved, with all internal organs in place"

Unlike many of today's bears, which are omnivorous, cave bears likely didn't eat meat (except for maybe the occasional scavenging of other dead cave bears), making them largely vegetation-eating machines. These bears must have eaten a lot, because they were huge — up to 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) tall when they reared up on their hind legs, according to Ars Technica. Although most cave bears likely weighed about 1,100 lbs. (500 kilograms), some weighed as much as 3,300 lbs. (1,500 kg), according to a 2018 study in the journal PLOS One. That's way more than their closest living relatives, the brown bear (U. arctos) and the polar bear (U. maritimus).

After living in Eurasia since at least 300,000 years ago, cave bears mysteriously went extinct about 25,000 to 20,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Maximum. Humans likely hunted the bears to extinction, a 2019 study in the journal Scientific Reports found. (Many other big animals, known as megafauna, went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago, but it's still unclear whether the changing temperatures at the end of the last ice age or human interference played a larger role in their demise.)

full article at:
https://www.livescience.com/cave-bear-mummies-siberia.html

[niyad]

1. Incredible. Thank you for sharing this.

[Warpy]

2. Internal organs will be iinteresting

GI contents will reveal whether it froze or starved.

I rather doubt humans hunted them to extinction, there were too few humans around for that. I think the glacial maximum that was just starting when this bear died was the more likely culprit, destroying habitat and disrupting the food chain.

They were likely on the menu, but not in sufficient number for extinction and quite possibly as carrion.