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Bears
Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos
Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos
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Polar Bears - Data, Pictures and Videos
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What is a polar bear?
Evolutionarily speaking, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) are brown bears (Ursus arctos). That might seem counterintuitive, but modern biologists classify species according to their evolutionary history. Organisms that are more closely related are grouped together. In this system, only clades — groups of organisms that contain all the descendents of an ancestor — are named. When we look at the family tree of bears, we can see that not only are polar bears most closely related to brown bears, but they actually fall within the brown bear clade. There is no clade that includes all the brown bears and excludes the polar bears. From an evolutionary perspective, polar bears are simply a unique and highly specialized sort of brown bear! http://redirect.viglink.com/?key=71fe213...%25C2%25A0  *This image is copyright of its original author https://www.gov.nt.ca/ecc/sites/ecc/file...script.pdf Got it off Warsaw from Carnivora. |
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