There is a world somewhere between reality and fiction. Although ignored by many, it is very real and so are those living in it. This forum is about the natural world. Here, wild animals will be heard and respected. The forum offers a glimpse into an unknown world as well as a room with a view on the present and the future. Anyone able to speak on behalf of those living in the emerald forest and the deep blue sea is invited to join.
(02-04-2016, 03:35 PM)brotherbear Wrote: Cave art in France depicts the cave bears in red which suggests that cave bears were typically red ( reddish brown ) in color.
*This image is copyright of its original author
When I went and saw the frescas in delos (greek island and the birthplace of apollo) they could only use certain colors because of what is available to them. Sometimes ancient civilizations just couldn't accurately depict the colors since they didn't have the items needed to make them or just weren't aware of them or they just didn't make strong ink etc.
Just something to think about
02-05-2016, 06:34 AM( This post was last modified: 02-05-2016, 06:35 AM by Polar )
I've heard of U. ingressus and U. spelaeus, but not U. kudarensis. If so, is it right that the Cave Bear (U. spelaeus) descended from U. ingressus which descended from the original ursine, U. etruscus? (I remember reading this idea on a Google Book document, but I can't find the book in their library?)
(02-05-2016, 06:34 AM)Polar Wrote: I've heard of U. ingressus and U. spelaeus, but not U. kudarensis. If so, is it right that the Cave Bear (U. spelaeus) descended from U. ingressus which descended from the original ursine, U. etruscus? (I remember reading this idea on a Google Book document, but I can't find the book in their library?)
U. etruscus derived from U. minimus which known as the common ancestor of the brown bear lineage and the black bear lineage.
The European branch of U. etruscus gave the rise of U. deningeri, U. ingressus, U. Kudarensis. Later, U. deningeri gave the rise of U. spalaeus.
The Asian branch of U. etruscus gave the rise of U. arctos.
The Cave Bear Story by Bjorn Kurten. Another striking character seen in most cave bear skulls is a peculiar doming or "step" of the forehead, which is rounded just over the eyes and forms what is technically called a glabella. Not all cave bear skulls have this character fully developed, and there are even some in which the forehead is almost flat, but such variants are rare.
The Cave Bear Story... Looking once more at the bear heads in profile, we may note a distinct difference in the shape of the muzzle. Compared to the length of the jaw, the nasal bridge in the cave bear is quite short so that the nasal opening tends to face upward rather than forward. It looks a little like the flattened nose of a pug dog, and, in fact, many restorations show the cave bear with a puglike face. I feel rather doubtful about this sort of restoration, for a retracted nasal bridge might also mean that the nose was well developed and movable. The nasal bones are actually very much shortened in animals provided with a trunk, like tapirs and elephants. Also, the cave bear does not have the underslung jaw of the pug. So I think the nose probably was not flat but quite long and protruding, and this is also the image seen in the art of Ice Age Man.
The Cave Bear Story... Finally, still looking at the skulls in side view, note the lower border of the jaw. If you imagine these skulls resting on the top of a table, the skull of the brown bear would rest firmly on its straight lower jaw. That of the cave bear, in contrast, would be a veritable rocking chair. In a way this characteristic gives the final touch to the cave bear skull as a sort of curved and bulging thing, as if you had taken a cleanly proportioned brown bear skull and blown it up unevenly into a bizarre caricature. It has a distinct significance, and we get to that by considering the purposes there are to a bear's head.
The Cave Bear Story... So the head of a bear, or of any mammal for that matter, has a purpose, or rather a number of purposes. To begin with, it serves to carry the main sense organs and the brain. Let us compare the eye sockets of the cave bear with those of the brown bear; we find that those of the cave bear are relatively small, and we may conclude that its eyesight was relatively feeble. On the other hand, the nasal cavity of the cave bear is quite large and suggests a keen sense of smell. Dissection of the inner ear may give an idea of the acuteness of the hearing, but this has not been done. The brain of the cave bear is not as large as you might expect from the size of the head. It is concealed far down at the back of the skull and is no larger than that of a normal brown bear. So it may be thought that the cave bear was not a particularly intelligent animal. In addition to the two already mentioned, the head has another purpose: to grasp and chew food. This function is fulfilled by the jaws and teeth and the muscles that operate them. This apparatus is very large in relation to the other parts of the skull. To it belong not only the actual jaws and teeth, but also the great zygomatic arches that jut out on both sides, and the great crest that passes along the top of the skull, uniting at the back with an almost equally prominent cross crest. These arches and crests serve to attach the muscles that move the jaws.
02-11-2016, 03:27 PM( This post was last modified: 02-11-2016, 03:35 PM by brotherbear )
The Cave Bear Story... The actual business of grasping and chewing is performed by the teeth. Teeth can tell us a great deal about the mode of life of an animal. So let us take a detailed look at the teeth of the cave bear. Bears are members of the order Carnivora, but most bears are far from exclusive carnivorous. They eat a wide range of animal and vegetable matter; they are omnivores, like man and the pig. And their omnovorous habits are reflected in the way that their teeth differ from those of other carnivores.
If the bear trend towards vegetarianism was sidetracked in the polar bear, it seems to have gone on to a veritable culmination in the cave bear. The French paleontologist Albert Gaudry called the cave bear "le moins carnivore des Carnivores et le plus ours des Ours" - the least carnivorous of carnivores, and the most bearish of bears."
The Cave Bear Story... The cave bear molars are much lengthened and expanded, and it is clear that they had tough work to do, grinding whatever food it was that the cave bear lived on. In old bears teeth wear down to senile stumps; the entire crown may eventually wear away, and in the end the roots are wearing down too. You can see this condition occasionally in very old brown or grizzly bears; in skulls of cave bears it is a common sight.
The Cave Bear Story... If we think an ordinary bear heavy of build, the cave bear with its barrel-like body carried this trait to the extreme. The large head was borne on a moderately long neck, apparently very often in a low-slung position near the ground. The limbs were rather short but very powerful, with broad, short feet turning inward even more sharply than in the brown bears. The feet were armed with powerful claws, shorter than those of the grizzly but very stout, which may have been used for digging as well as for attack and defense. All of the limb and foot bones of the cave bear are much stouter and heavier than those of the brown bear, and thus are easy to identify.
02-11-2016, 05:48 PM( This post was last modified: 02-11-2016, 05:59 PM by 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.
The Cave Bear Story... The image of the cave bear now emerges very clearly. We can visualize it as a great, ponderously lumbering bear moving about with its muzzle close to the ground most of the time. Although not a tree climber ( except perhaps the cubs ), it would move easily in alpine terrain. Its food would probably consist of succulent plants, berries, roots and tubers dug out of the ground, tender grass, small animals, and so on, and it would certainly not disdain the carcass of prey brought down by doughtier hunters such as the contemporary cave lion, leopard, or cave hyena.
The Cave Bear Story by Bjorn Kurten... There is even direct evidence of the tremendous breadth of the cave bear paw, in the shape of scratch marks made in the soft loam of the cave fill or on the floors and walls of various caves. In some cases these marks may have been made when the bear slipped on the moist surface. There are usually three to five parallel scratches, and the distance between the outermost marks may be up to 5.5 inches ( 14 cm ). In a modern brown bear, the corresponding figure is about 3.9 inches ( 10 cm ).
The Cave Bear Story by Bjorn Kurten - chapter 8 - The Substitute Cave Bear. I still remember my surprise when, years ago, I started to study the British cave bears. I knew, of course, that brown bears and grizzly bears ( now regarded as variants of the same species, Ursus arctos ) had been reported from British caves, together with Ursus spelaeus. In 1846 Richard Owen stated, "With the Ursus spelaeus was associated another bear, more like the common European species, but larger than the present individuals of the Ursus arctos." In the continental bear caves, it is not uncommon to find an occasional specimen of brown bear among the great mass of cave bear bones. This was the situation I expected to find in the British caves, but it turned out to be completely different. Tornewton Cave, in South Devon, is an example of a bear cave excavated by modern methods; it was dug during many years by Antony J. Sutcliffe and yielded a long sequence od fossiliferous strata, ranging in age from the Saalian glaciation to the end of the Pleistocene and into modern times. In Saalian times the cave was inhabited by bears, which have left their remains in great numbers in the lower strata. With the onset of a milder climate regime in Eemian times, the cave became a hyena den, and the bear is found no more, except for a few scraps. Weichsel-glacial occupation was more sporadic, with moose and red deer during interstadial conditions and mainly reindeer during the intensely cold end of the glaciation. The Saalian bears of Tornewton Cave behaved much like the continental bears. There are many remains of cubs in the cave, and there is the telltale age grouping suggesting that the cave was used for hibernationin winter but rarely if at all during the summer. All is according to pattern, except for one thing. It is the wrong species. It is not the cave bear at all. Every bone and tooth in Tornewton Cave belongs to the brown bear, Ursus arctos.
The Cave Bear Story... The situation is the same in most other bear caves in Britain. For instance, the famous Victoria Cave near Settle in Yorkshire was excavated a century ago by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and yielded a great fossil fauna of Eemian interglacial date. Both species, Ursus arctos and Ursus spelaeus, were reported as present there; but a recent restudy of the material showed that only the former species occurs; the "cave bear" was simply a huge brown bear. In fact I know of no evidence for the presence of Ursus spelaeus in Britain during Saalian and Eemian times.
