Short faced bear7/26/2023 ![]() The partially digested food in his intestinal tract revealed that his last meal was meager and thin, mostly needles and twigs from a fir tree, sedge leaves and seeds. Nearly all of his bones showed signs of severe and painful disease, mostly arthritis. It was no charmed life on the edge of this receding alpine lake. “At the excavation it was so fresh that we thought we could smell rotting meat at one place,” said David Gillette, who was Utah’s state paleontologist at the time.īased on the wear and tear of its teeth, the big bull mammoth was likely around sixty years old - granddaddy age for an elephant. It was in remarkable shape, thanks mostly to the encasement of mud that had hovered around freezing for thousands of years, acting as the perfect refrigerator - and preservation agent - for this ancient mammoth. That summer about 90 percent of the mammoth’s skeleton was found during a meticulous recovery process. To the crew’s credit, work halted and a concerted excavation began. Part of a long, curved tusk was also found. It turned out to be a front leg of a fifteen-foot-tall Columbian mammoth. A closer examination revealed that it was actually a bone. Out of the sticky mud he pulled what looked to be a log. On August 8, 1988, a man named Chris Nielson was digging with a backhoe as part of a reconstruction project for Huntington Reservoir in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. ![]() The Center for Biological Diversity’s Mike Stark brings their story back to life - and helps illuminate the cost of today’s extinction crisis. These massive animals, which stood 10-feet-tall on their hind legs and weighed nearly a ton, vanished near the end of the Pleistocene. ©2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.Įditor’s Note: Giant short-faced bears (Arctodus simus ) went extinct some 11,000 years ago. ![]() This large male specimen probably weighed close to a ton, which is more than twice what the Bear Center’s resident adult male Ted weighs.Excerpted from Chasing the Ghost Bear: On the Trail of America’s Lost Super Beast by Mike Stark by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Ice Age campers had to hang their food higher than campers do today.Īrcheologists estimate most giant short-faced bears, including females, to weigh 1600 to 1900 pounds. If he rotated his shoulder upward a few inches, he could reach even higher. Subtracting 42 inches from the center of the shoulder blade to the tip of the nose, this bear could reach 30 inches above his up-stretched nose-to at least 14½ feet. This skeleton measures 72 inches from the center of the shoulder blade to the tips of the toes (adding 2 inches for the missing claws). ![]() He could reach 2 ½ to 3 feet higher with a paw than he could reach with his mouth. He could look up and bite a branch 12 feet high. That’s 11 feet, 2 inches standing up looking at you or peering down through a basketball hoop. ![]() If short-faced bears had a hump of muscle on the shoulders, he could have been as much as 6 feet at the shoulders.įrom the crown to the hip joint and down to the heel is 134 inches. With the front legs straight, the skeleton is 66 inches to the top of the shoulder blades (the big shield-shaped shoulder bones). On 4 feet, he was 5½ to 6 feet at the shoulders. ![]()
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