Beautifully preserved cave bears emerge from Siberian permafrost | Hacker News Reader

Beautifully preserved cave bears emerge from Siberian permafrost

arstechnica.com

75 pointsHooke29 comments

The extinction of these bears reminds me that as recently as 1969 major publication in the US like Sports Illustrated were calling for the Grizzly Bear to be eradicated from national parks.

https://vault.si.com/vault/43006

Well at least it wasn't to commit genocide against the native americans. Baby steps.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buf...

It's interesting how most of the national/state/sports team animals are extinct or verge of extinction. California bears to michigan wolverines to the american bald eagle.

I wonder if we now have the technology to clone these beasts, given the huge trove of DNA.

Tiresome bioethics arguments aside ("We probably can, but should we?"), it would be fascinating to witness a revival of Pleistocene fauna... maybe Neanderthals as well.

I think it's unclear whether the technology yet exists but it may not be far off -- and we could de-extinct ecosystems, not just single organisms, potentially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleistocene_Park#Animals_that_...

Some of the possibilities for animals that could plausibly be brought back are kinda wild. I'd love to see a living moa for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-extinction#Future_potential...

You can get a dog cloned in South Korea for ~80_000$

What would the expected profits of Pleistocene Park vs. the security risks look like.

It’ll be fine, totally fine. We’ll put the park on an island, that way it’s isolated, see? Walls, strict safety policies, emergency procedures. Also, they’re just ancient animals, they don’t have the advanced intelligence to outwit us.

Also be sure to put the entire park's security and electrical system in the hands of a former postal worker.

With many species, there is basically no risk. While an escaping bear or tiger is of course a risk if you run into that individuum, humans are far too good at dealing with those species, as the constant extinction-risk for their modern cousins shows. Most of the damage to ecological systems is done today by invasive species, which are either actively brought to new regions or travel secretly along with humans.

Does anyone know why cave bears and cave lions are named "cave" bears and "cave" lions? I refuse to believe entire species of megafauna lived in caves and that caves were somehow more plentiful in the distant past to be able to support the entirety of such large species. They should really come up with new and accurate descriptive names, or, at the very least, less inaccurate names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_bear

The cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) was a species of bear that lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and became extinct about 24,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum.

Both the word "cave" and the scientific name spelaeus are used because fossils of this species were mostly found in caves. This reflects the views of experts that cave bears may have spent more time in caves than the brown bear, which uses caves only for hibernation.

"In fact, most cave bear fossils have been found inside caves, and paleontologists think these bears probably lived in the caves full-time, rather than just popping in for a quick four-month nap"

Well, the article states different, but also to me this seems highly unlikely. Also because apparently this cave bear was not found in a cave.

Or that’s where they were found because that’s the best-preserved place they sheltered in or went to die in. Especially for tigers: even domestic cats are known to search for a place to die alone and especially prefer cooler, darker places.

What evolutionary pressures would’ve caused an animal to seek a particular place to die?

If the animal has a contagious disease, it makes sense to isolate itself from the others.

Humans, too, are affected by this at least under hypothermia. According to Wikipedia it's called "terminal burrowing", or "hide-and-die syndrome".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia

I don't read that in the comment.

S/he is saying they were selectively preserved in the fossil record while they were there. So if they died there, we would find them, whereas megafauna in the open would be lost to decay and would not fossilize.

the article does suggest they actually did live in the caves "full-time" though:

  In fact, most cave bear fossils have been found inside caves,
  and paleontologists think these bears probably lived in the 
  caves full-time, rather than just popping in for a quick 
  four-month nap. Across Europe and Asia, bears and people 
  probably competed for the same real estate for around 
  300,000 years; it probably wasn’t much of a contest, though. 
  These lumbering Ice Age giants stood 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) 
  high when they reared up on their hind legs, and the largest 
  males weighed up to 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds). That’s 
  about the size of a large polar bear or Kodiak bear today. 
  You wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark cave.

Not sure if you saw that part, but article mentions 300,000 years of coprolites found in the caves which indicates an extensive presence of these animals.

I always assumed it associated them with cave men, so was just a rough mechanism of dating the animals.

I asked this[1] of Jamie Woodward, an academic who tweets about Ice Age things. Sadly, he was unable or unwilling to answer.

[1] OK, not precisely this, my questions were: "Why do only the cool animals get to have a cave version? Was there no cave weasel, cave bunny, cave vole? Also, who would win in a fight between a honey badger and a cave badger?"

Nature is finally showing us some of her real treasures! There's no telling what wonders we will discover when all of this permafrost finally melts for good and mankind is able to access these inaccessible and rich terrains!

Moria! Moria! Wonder of the Northern world. Too deep we delved there, and woke the nameless fear. -- JRR Tolkien

Are you refering to the gigatons of CO2 frozen in the permafrost and about to be released with the melting?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/arcti...

Or perhaps ancient virus and bacteria stores.

https://www.google.com/search?q=permafrost+bacteria&oq=perma...

Womankind not included? ;-)

Admittedly nit-picking and out-of-context, but it's important, everywhere, every time:

"Extensive research examined the implications of using the word "man" generically to refer to both males and females, as in the word "mankind", and it was found that it elicited mental imagery that tended to focus more on males than females. The conclusions were that the so-called "generic" senses ofthe word were subconsciously contaminated by the male sense of the word. The result: women were getting lost in our language." - Kerry A. Bodine, "C'mon Guys: This Way to a Study on Language and Sexism"

There's an H.P. Lovecraft story about that: At the Mountains of Madness.

Although, back in his day they thought that Antarctica already had a giant inland sea. Jules Verne also wrote about the idea in some of his stories. It's hard to imagine these days, but there used to be parts of the earth's surface that nobody had ever surveyed in fairly contemporary times.

Zombears :)

Let me think about a movie:

The thaw!

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