The cave bear
An almost entirely vegetarian bear hibernates in European caves in enormous numbers.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 171 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 50 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Ursus spelaeus is a large bear with a domed forehead and blunt, grinding molars indicating a diet of plants rather than meat. It hibernated in caves in such numbers that some sites contain the remains of thousands of individuals — bears that died in their sleep over tens of thousands of years. Those accumulations make it one of the best-sampled Pleistocene mammals, and cave bear DNA was among the first ancient genomes recovered from a non-human species.