Arctodus | Boneblogger: Science and the outdoors

How big was the Giant Short-faced Bear?

Greg — Sat, 15 May 2010 19:38:35 +0000

The character of living things on land changed forever after the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinctions, 65 million years ago. The dinosaurs on land and the marine reptiles in the oceans went extinct, leaving way for mammals and birds to evolve into those niches once held by the “terrible lizards” (dinosaurs) and other giant reptiles. Throughout the Cenozoic, […]

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Denning behavior in the Giant Short-faced Bear

Greg — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:33:55 +0000

One of the most exciting things in paleontology to me is when we can begin to tease apart how extinct animals, animals that humans often never set eyes upon, lived their everyday lives. I am often amazed at how my colleagues can drill deep into questions that at first seem unanswerable; using creative ways to […]

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Giant Short-Faced Bear Reexamined

Greg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:44:49 +0000

As the old saying goes, looks can be deceiving. That is the theme of a new paper on the Giant Short-Faced Bear (GSFB), Arctodus simus, recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (Figueirido et al., 2010). We have explored this beast in other posts (see below), and will no doubt do so in the […]

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Giant Short-Faced Bear: a Northern California Original

Greg — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:55:59 +0000

In 1878, James D. Richardson explored Potter Creek Cave in Shasta County, California. He found the skull of a bear beneath several inches of cave dirt, and he sent the specimen to Edward D. Cope, who determined that it was the type specimen for a new species of American “cave bear” (Cope, 1879). When a […]

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