Excerpts: from the Sunday Times: Polar bear is a ‘new’ species
by Jonathan Leake
Polar bears may have come into existence only 150,000 years ago, when trapped brown bears had to adapt to an ice age
Polar bears may have come into existence only 150,000 years ago, when brown bears were trapped by an ice age and had to adapt quickly to survive, scientists have found.
The suggestion follows the discovery of the jawbone of an animal that died up to 130,000 years ago, making it the oldest polar bear fossil found. The bone has yielded new insights into the origins of Earth’s largest land predator.
One is the possibility that polar bears owe their existence not only to past climate change, including ice ages, but have also survived at least one long period of global warming.
The bone was discovered at Poolepynten on the Arctic island of Svalbard by Professors Olafur Ingolfsson, of the University of Iceland, and Oystein Wiig, of the University of Oslo.
…
In a paper they said: “Brown bears of the ABC islands may be descendants of ancient ursids [bears] that diverged from other lineages of brown bears and subsequently founded the polar bear lineage.” This view is expected to get support from new research, out this week, based on DNA extracted from the Poolepynten jawbone.
It means polar bears have already survived a global warming that affected the northern hemisphere from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic ice cap were smaller than now. Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, an expert in ice ages, said: “Early polar bears would not have had all the specialisations of modern animals and we know nothing about their behaviour.
“Living through a warm period back then does not mean they are resilient to climate change now.”
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rbateman (10:21:59) :
“Seems to me I watched a special where Polar Bears that bore their young in an ice-free environment had cubs that were brown. As if they are programmed to adapt to whatever the cycle is doing.
So, do humans revert back to neanderthals in an ice-age?”
Ugh?
“Tenuc (14:48:16) :
[…]
Ugh?”
Don’t do that, i nearly spilled my coke!
kwik (14:25:35) :
The worst issue is sea-level rising.
First of all, there is none>>
Of course not. Polar bears eat seals. Since the polar bear level is rising, the seal level must be falling. Every time a polar bear pulls a seal out of the ocean it displaces less water and the sea-level also falls. So increases is polar bears must be inverse to both seal-level and sea-level.
It would be most unfortunate for man to ever control the climate to the point there is no variability whatsoever. Don’t like that low temperature? Why, just twiddle the CO2 dial and it will go away! Don’t like that high temperature? Why, just twiddle the CO2 dial the other way and it will go away.
If they had their druthers, climate anomalies would be a thing of the past and weather (cataclysmic climate anomalies of short duration) will have completely disappeared!
But if you want to make sure a species loses its resilience to climate change, that’s the best way to do it.
So if we need more polar bears we just convince brown bears to move north again … I read that polar bears actually came into existence about 250,000 years ago — regardless it doesn’t seem like the liberal approach that every thing that is, has always been … Else wouldn’t their still be woolly mammoths and saber tooth tigers still hopping around.
As others have commented, follow the food trail. polar bears follow the seals, which follow….?, which follow…..?
Nothing survives without a “food chain”.
As far as I know this is (at lest mostly) old news. It has long been known that the two species are closely related and that the speciation is very recent. Perhaps this specific piece of evidence and the timeline given from it are relatively new. Even Wikipedia places divergence from the Brown Bear population at less than 200,000 years. Probably some details in the story are new, but they are minor.
When grizzlies mate with polars and make grolars, then what? http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2624712
Stinger, on Ingolfsson and Wiig (2010), for the scientific community™
“Living through a warm period back then does not mean they are resilient to climate change now.”
So there you have it, you’ve all been ‘debunked’ by science.
P Gosselin (11:05:36) :
“2007 IPCC WG3 is now coming under the microscope, and what is being found is far from pretty. Loads of gray literature, and ambiguities made fact.”
Time for the economists to weigh in en masse.
“Jeff Alberts (12:23:31) :
I guess that would be global warming as opposed to Global Warming.”
:))
I’m pretty sure polar bears can survive by eating climate tourists. It’s odd that people would think the key to the survival of an incredibly versatile and intelligent apex predator is to make sure its environment is a frozen, barren wasteland.
Since we’re talking about evolution of white fur, is it “fair” to bring up the question of blonde, blue-eyed people? When did they split off from the rest of us and why? What advantage is blondness? I think it is equally fair to say it’s not an intellectual one, based on the common occurrence and tenor of blonde jokes.
The critter identified as a “brown bear” in the photo looks like a grizzly rather than what Americans would call a brown bear. (The hump over the shoulders is the giveaway.) Is there a difference in terminology across the pond?
Mike McMillan (13:47:37) :
“I can’t see how broad paws and breath-holding ability are going to hurt a polar bear’s ability to rummage a landfill. Bears of any flavor aren’t picky eaters. You’ll see the evolution of Ursus dumpus in a Nanook minute.”
That is classic! My vote for quote of the week.
jack morrow (13:21:01) :
I guess the new Pen “arctic explorers” will find out about the bears and all this next season when they take off on another exciting adventure.Stay tuned.
“Do not meddle in the affairs of Polar Bears for you are crunchy and good
with ketchup!” -unk. paraphrased from” Affairs of Dragons”
Could it be that the Polar Bear is mainly a subspecies? Color phase?…
It’s funny,looking at that photo,I want to stay far away from the brown bear,but I want to cuddle the polar bear.Both killers,but only one has the bad reputation.All animals are cute when little,but the cuteness ends when they grow up,not so with polar bears or killer whales.That’s what one-sided publicity does for you.AGW is not going down anytime soon.
Polar bears already rummage in dumpsters. Many towns on the edge of polar bear territory have to deal with polar bears walking through town looking for McDonald quarter pounder left overs.
“Since we’re talking about evolution of white fur, is it “fair” to bring up the question of blonde, blue-eyed people? When did they split off from the rest of us and why? What advantage is blondness?”
I believe that so far it is believe that blue eyes evolved in what is now Turkey but I forget when.
The pigment melanin is less abundant in lighter skinned people. Light skin produces more vitamin D on exposure to sunlight than dark skin does. The sunlight is less direct the farther North you get. People who produce the most vitamin D with the least amount on sunlight would be “selected in” as others would have health problems that over the generations would allow those what produce more vitamin D to out populate them.
By the same token, people with little melanin would be selected out at lower latitudes as they would suffer in direct sunlight and be subject to all sorts of problems including infections caused by abscessed sunburn blisters.
So light skin is selected in at high latitude, selected out at low latitude among populations of people “in the wild” over thousands of generations.
Today’s humans can survive anywhere as we have things that allow us to protect ourselves from over exposure to sunlight or take vitamin suppliments as needed.
And then there are the redheads. We have a defective melatonin gene, and less of it. There are other things related to that defect I can’t go into and still be considered a sober intelligent amateur scientist.
“Polar bear population: 1950 = 5,000 and 2005 = 20,000+”
Ah yes, but those 15,00 extra bears are not multiyear bears.
Light skin produces more vitamin D on exposure to sunlight than dark skin does>>>
Light skinned people also have a different kind of fat than dark skinned people which helps them tolerate cold better, but makes them more sensitive to high temperatures which dark skinned people tolerate better.
Jerry from Boston
“severe longevity issues…”
QOTW
Redheaded polar bears dumpster diving??
Only possible on WUWT. 🙂
The irony of this is unvbelievable … so …… actually ‘bears’ proved themselves to be incredibly adaptive to a big climate change 150,000 years ago …. but for some reason they are in desperate trouble now ….
These [snip] journalists can’t even spot their own unintended illogicalities.
And then there are grolars (Polar Bears getting together with their close genetic cousins) …
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2624712
Technically aren’t we in an interglacial in an ongoing ‘ice age’ with the 5 last glaciations following roughly the Milankovitch cycle and prior to that a few 50-50 splits … and given we are cooler (by proxy data) than other interglacials or even other periods in the Holocene, we could enter the next glaciation at any time. There is some that postulate hopefully that the changes in land use precipitated by humans will gives us some more time.
Anyway, homo sapiens would probably be extinct or never would have developed the way they did without this biological stress of this environment … so I guess we should be just happy to be here 🙂 … and wasn’t that a hockey game! Give Crosby a little room and what do you get?