CAVE BEAR

SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION 

Skeleton of the cave bear

• KINGDOM : Animalia

• PHYLUM : Chordata 

• CLASS : Mammalia

• ORDER : Carnivora

• FAMILY : Ursidae

• GENUS : Ursus

• SPECIES : Ursus Spelaeus  

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 

• SIZE :  About 7 ft to 10 feet long.

• WEIGHT : 500 - 1000 pounds

• LIFE SPAN : 15 -20 Years

• HABITAT: Mountains  and woodlands of the Europe

• HISTORICAL EPOCH : Middle to late Pleistocene age

INTRODUCTION:  

                              Cave bear was a species of bear that come in the earth at the middle Pleistocene age, around 1,000,000 years ago, and extinct from the world at the late p]Pleistocene age, around 20,000 years ago.From the study, it is proved that this bears spend much more time in the cave than the brown bears, that is why the scientists name them cave bear.

DESCRIPTION: 

                             Cave bears had a large head with a massive canine teeth. From the cave painting it seems that they had a short ears and a pig-like face, which makes them look like the modern teddy bears. Its front legs were massive, with huge paws and claws- like today's grizzly. males are almost 900- 1100 pounds heavy, where the females are almost 500- 600 pounds heavy- that shows, the males are twice bigger than the females. from the study, its looks like they grew larger in the glaciation periods than the inter-glaciation period.

HABITAT AND RANGE :

Fossil structure of the cave bear

                            Cave bears' range stretched across Europe, from Spain to great Britain in west, Italy, Poland, parts of Germany, the Balkans, Austria, Switzerland, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and parts of Russia, including the Caucasus, and northern Iran; though no evidence were found for what we can say that the they lived in Scotland, Scandinavian or the Baltic countries, which were completely covered in extensive glacial at the time. The cave bear inhabited low mountain areas, they seems to avoid the open plains. They preferred the forest areas.

DIET :

                            From the study, it looks like they cave bears are very much herbivorous, even more than the brown bears.it dug up the roots, ate berries, etc. It may have dug up burrowing animals such as marmots. it is suggested that the cave bears may be specialized on digging up root-beds in deep glacial silt.

REPRODUCTION :

                            It is expected that cave bears had similar breeding habits to the brown bears.

THREATS :

1. Saber-tooth and other carnivores used to hunt cave bears for their foods, 
2. Many fossils were found which indicates that many sub-adult cave bears often failed to get through the hibernation. It's probably because the adults excluded them from the best feeding areas and so they failed to put on enough fat to survive winter. 
3. Human also hunt the cave bears not only for food, they hunt them for the hunting ritual or they kept the skull as the winning trophies. they also killed them for their habitat, as they can take shelter in the caves of the cave bears.

EVOLUTION :

                          It is thought that the cave bears were came from the Plio-Pleistocene Etruscan bears(Ursus Etruscus) who lived in the earth from, 5.3 million years ago to 10,000 years ago. The immediate precursor of cave bears were most probably Ursus Deningeri.

EXTINCTION : 

Human hunting cave bear

                          The extinction of the cave bears were very controversial, and very mysterious, it is not happened for a single factor, a complex set factor happened, for the studies of different scientist, we can conclude, the main causes are these-

1. Human hunts too much cave bears that leads them to their extinction.
2. Climate change is also a heavy factor, at the time of the beginning of the ice age cave bears might not adopted that climate change. and gone extinct. 
3. At the beginning of the ice age there was a huge food crisis, that leads the cave bears in starvation and also the predators killed too much cave bears for food.
4. Some scientist thought that at the time of the beginning of the ice age, cave bears were attacked by some virus and bacteria, that caused their extinction.  

                       Though my personal view is the cave bears not gone extinct, at the beginning of the ice age or before the beginning of the ice age, a group of these cave bears started to migrate to the north, and evolved into polar bears, read my this article THE EVOLUTION OF POLAR BEAR

REFERENCE :

1.  FATE OF THE CAVE BEAR by Andrew curry
2. CAVE BEAR by Bob Strauss
3. Huge Cave Bears: When and Why They Disappeared from livescience staff
4. cave bear Wikipedia
5. cave bear  BBC science