Bears of the Pleistocene

[brotherbear]

The Cave Bear Story... How much did the cave bear weigh? This can be estimated in various ways. One good method would be to make a careful life restoration of the bear in the form of a sculpture. ( There is an excellent one in the natural history museum in Basel, Switzerland. ) The volume of the sculpture would be measured by immersing it in water. To find out the weight of the cave bear it is necessary also to know the specific gravity of a living bear. To my knowledge this has not been done for bears, but a somewhat similar study was carried out on crocodiles and dinosaur restorations some years ago in an attempt to estimate the weights of some of the extinct dinosaurs. 
The cave bear's weight can also be estimated directly from some of the bones of its skeleton. For example, the limb bones have to withstand the weight of the animal and have to increase in thickness as the weight grows greater. A comparison of the cross section of the femur ( thighbone ) of a cave bear with that of a brown bear reveals that the cross-sectional surface for a male cave bear is about 2.5 to 3 times greater than for a male European brown bear. The latter weighs about 350 pounds ( 160 kg ) on the average, so the weight of the cave bear should then be about 900 to 1,000 pounds ( 400 to 450 kg ). These estimates relate to large males and to fairly lean individuals, not to the superfatted bear seeking its den in late autumn, when it probably weighed a great deal more. On the other hand, the smaller female cave bear probably reached little more than half the weight of the male.   Reply