![]() Lions roamed the landĪlthough the bears in ice age North America were the biggest and most powerful carnivores, they had some stiff competition. Nevertheless, the short-faced bear would have been a towering, frightening beast. ![]() We don’t know if these bears were ferocious hunters, chasing down their prey at 40 km/h, or far-ranging scavengers that followed the faint scent of a carcass using their acute sense of smell. They had slender limbs compared to the heavily-built bears we see today and stood tall, reaching 4 metres when reared up - more like a grizzly bear on stilts. It was one of the biggest and most powerful predators the world has seen, weighing an immense 900 kilograms and standing 2 metres at the shoulder. In prehistoric North America, the short-faced bear ( Arctodus simus) ruled the land. If so, they would have encountered a strange cast of ferocious predators and giant herbivores who lived here during the Ice Age. However, a new Nature of Things documentary, Ice Bridge, outlines the theory of two rogue archeologists who believe that people may have arrived here thousands of years earlier and from a very different place.Īrcheologists Dennis Stanford and Bruce Bradley propose that people from western Eurasia (now called Europe), known as ‘Solutreans’, travelled here by crossing the Atlantic Ocean, following the giant ice shelf that covered the northern Atlantic during the ice age 20,000 years ago.įilmmakers Use Special Effects To Bring Back Ice Age Animals Most archeologists agree that human beings reached North America 14,000 years ago, crossing a land bridge that existed between eastern Russia and modern-day Alaska. You can follow LiveScience senior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter and on Facebook. Schubert and his colleagues announced the discovery in December and plan to submit a full description of the Gray Fossil Site bear material to a scientific journal this year. "I saw a big canine and realized, 'uh-oh,'" Supplee told LiveScience. ![]() The first short-faced bear jaw fragments turned up in 2003, but it wasn't until Gray Fossil Site preparator Jeff Supplee was putting a plaster jacket on a tapir skeleton in 2011 in preparation for removing it from the ground that the skull turned up. Animals who wandered into this lake didn't always make it out, and their bones - tens of thousands of them - were preserved. The Gray Fossil site, discovered during highway construction in 2000, was a forested lake that filled a sinkhole 4.5 million to 7 million years ago during the Miocene Epoch. "What we have at Gray is a potential ancestor to the largest bears that ever lived," Schubert told LiveScience. In South America, a larger species called Arctotherium angustidens reached the record size of over 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg), making it the largest bear ever known. During the Ice Age, for example, giant short-faced bears that weighed up to 1,800 pounds (816 kg) roamed North America. The lineage boasts some hard-hitters, as well. The spectacled bear happens to be the closest living relative to the ancient short-faced bears, and the only surviving member of the short-faced bear's subfamily, Tremarctinae. The bear was relatively small, about the size of, or even smaller than, today's spectacled bears, which weigh between 130 and 400 pounds (nearly 60 and 181 kilograms) for females and males, respectively.
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