As permafrost and glaciers melt around the world from a warming climate, ancient secrets continue to be unveiled around the world. Here's one of them - a bear who was found entirely intact, including its skin, fur and internal organs!
The bear, unearthed in 2020, was originally assumed to be an extinct cave bear that dated back at least 22,000 years. But a new necropsy reveals it is actually a brown bear that lived 3,500 years ago.
A perfectly preserved, mummified bear found entombed in the Siberian permafrost in 2020 isn't what scientists thought it was, a new analysis reveals. It turns out that the eerily intact carcass is much younger than first assumed and belongs to an entirely different species.
Reindeer herders unearthed the remains, which include the bear's intact skin, fur, teeth, nose, claws, body fat and internal organs, on Bolshoy Lyakhovsky Island, a remote Russian island located in the East Siberian Sea. Researchers named it the Etherican bear, after the nearby Bolshoy Etherican River.
When the Etherican bear was first uncovered, researchers at the Lazarev Mammoth Museum Laboratory at North-Eastern Federal University (NEFU) in Yakutsk, who have led the analysis of the remains, thought that the mummy was an extinct cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
Fossils of this long-lost species suggest that the enormous ancient bears, which are closely related to brown bears (Ursus arctos) and polar bears (Ursus maritimus), grew to around 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) tall and weighed a whopping 3,300 pounds (1,500 kilograms). U. spelaeus went extinct around 22,000 years ago, toward the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest part of the last ice age, so the researchers believed that the mummy was at least this old.
However, subsequent analysis revealed that their assumptions about the Etherican bear were way off: In reality, the beast was a brown bear that dated to around 3,460 years ago, the NEFU team said in a statement in December 2022.
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