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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If you think about it further, every animal alive today, including us, can trace an unbroken lineage back to the start of life on this planet, showing that our ancestors (albeit for most of that time not human) survived every change in the climate over those billions of years, both hot and cold. Perhaps life, and its ability to adapt, is more ‘robust’ that some give it credit for.
Pamela Gray (17:58:32) :
‘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.’
I didn’t know that intelligent amateur scientist had to sober to be considered.
Hudson, Nelson and Lia don’t appear to be suffering the effects of climate change (e.g. extinction). http://seaworld.myfun.com.au/Attractions/Marine-Attractions/Polar-Bear-Shores.htm
Apart from some chilled water (15-17C) , a few fans and misters, they appear to be enjoying their excursion to a tropical climate (avg 18.6 C). http://www.zoolex.org/zoolexcgi/view.py?id=246
Now I can’t say if they are pining for the fjords or not but neither do I believe the PR blurb: “Guests can visit the cute and playful bear cubs …”. But it is clear that they are surviving and thriving without zub zero temperatures.
davidmhoffer (18:07:25) :
“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.”
That would be me. Red hair, freckles. Comfortable in shorts & flip flops when most people are bundled up. Miserable in any kind of heat.
MikeD
Read somewhere that blue eyes are thought to have emerged some 6000 yrs ago.
Polar bears have produced fertile offspring with both European and Alaskan brown bears. It is not surprising as all are variants of the brown bear. Bears don’t care how we define species. Whether the white variant does or does not go extinct the basic brown bear strategy will continue to emerge new bear strategies. AGWs need a static climate world and a static evolutionary world– Darwin’s evolution laughs at your stationary world.
Grizzly and Brown Bear are the same species (Ursus arctos) and all have humps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Bear
Brown bears in the US are now only found in Montana and Alaska, as they have been hunted out of the rest of the states
Black bears (Ursus americanus) are the smaller bears found in most parts of the US.
crosspatch-
I’m dark complected, blue eyes, dark(graying) hair.I tolerate both cold and heat well.I have to watch my vitamin D, as I can be a bit low.My wife gives me a bad time, as I can go out in 20f. weather in a light jacket, and work all day long in 90f. in shorts and t-shirt. I am Scot,Irish, Native American and a bit of Barbadian.
My wife kids me about the ability to go out in cold weather in a kilt or loincloth…
My former fellow Fellows in the Society who did evolutionary biology were explaining me how they can compute the time of divergence, based on the mutation of the immaterial part of the information stored in the DNA. I hope this can be done here, too.
The hypothesis of their recent origin sounds very plausible. I do think that the distance between brown and polar bears is not too much bigger than between the human races.
Cheers, LM
“does not mean they are resilient to climate change now.” made me wonder……so….Good old Google time = http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSIN21729920070503
Vision of a Polar Bear with sunglasses on!
Craig Moore (15:50:20) :
When grizzlies mate with polars and make grolars, then what?
When Papa Bear is a grizzly and Mama is a polar, you get a grolar.
When Papa is a polar and Mama is a grizz, you get a pozzly.
The etymological jury is still out on what a grizzled pair of bi-polar bears will produce…
42125 (11:22:36):
Correct me if I’m wrong but in evolutionary terms the Holocene Optimum, 8000 to 5200 BP, seems too short a time for physical adaptations to have taken place and be present in today’s polar bears. In other words are the Polar bears of today that much different from the Polar bears of the Holocene Optimum when summer temperatures at the North Pole was much warmer than today. Another way of looking at it is how different are humans living around the 8000 years ago to humans living around the Arctic today? I think even Stringer would say nil, but I might be wrong. Please note that Stringer is not a climatologist.
Jimbo, the polar ursus has been noted to be physically changing for about the last thirty years. Their overall size is getting smaller, but more curious their head seems to be getting more narrow.
Of course, the head thing is said to be due to GW, but in reality is more probable an advancement in physiological structure for better ice penetration when hunting seals.
@ur momisugly Mike D.
Counter-intuitively, maybe there are so many ‘blonde girl’ jokes precisely because brunette women have more time to sit around on Friday nights instead of being invited out to parties.
According to research published in 2008 between 6,000 to 7,000 ice cover in the Arctic Ocean was greatly reduced. The Arctic Ocean may have been periodically ice free. If true then are some people suggesting that Polar bears then are evolutionarily quite different to today’s Polar bears. Read more here.
Different topic but Swansea daffodils did not bloom in time for St David’s Day. Had to wear a falsey!
DeNihilist (00:22:45) :
“Jimbo, the polar ursus has been noted to be physically changing for about the last thirty years. ”
Thanks for the correction, do you have a source / reference as I would like to read up more on it. Anyway, if they can change that rapidly in 30 years then they can do so in a future warming Arctic which still gives them resilliance and adaptability. They eat from dumpsters and live in European zoos which aren’t always at -1C. :o)
What about the poor Arctic foxed? Who will protect them against the Polar bears?:o)
http://tinyurl.com/ycz2ct3
Ron House (17:59:23) :
“Ah yes, but those 15,000 extra bears are not multiyear bears.”
Nice one Ron!
davidmhoffer (18:07:25) :
“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.”
Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blond hair. I grew up in the Northeastern US, and after a year of 100+F heat in Vietnam, I lost my tolerance for cold weather and have never regained it.
On the plus side, I’m more comfortable in the 120+F heat of Iraq than some of the local Arabs are.
Go figure…
Okay, okay — my hair’s now *white*…
Polar Bears in warm zoos seem to do just fine. Why should they have any trouble adapting to changes in the wild?
The only threat to polar bears now is food source and not the bears adaptablity.
Man is the great harvester and waster.
Early history of ships coming to America described the cod fish as so plentiful as to be seen for miles on top of the ocean.
” DeNihilist (00:22:45) :
Jimbo, the polar ursus has been noted to be physically changing for about the last thirty years. Their overall size is getting smaller, but more curious their head seems to be getting more narrow.
Of course, the head thing is said to be due to GW, but in reality is more probable an advancement in physiological structure for better ice penetration when hunting seals.”
puh-leez. The real story is their heads are getting thinner so that there eyes can move more laterally to better enable them to see Greenpeacers sneaking up on them with a spray can of paint. [/sarc]
God help the world if this is the level of technical understanding today, and especially about things biological.
I have a hypothesis about the severely declining level of intellectual science. When the Boomers entered the post-secondary education game in the mid 60s, college space was scant, so there was a massive building program to add more degree granting schools.
But there was also a scarcity of strong minds to fill their faculties, so what we got was a rapid infill of naive and not especially bright new PhDs to staff these schools. The result was the production of a glut of equally not-too-bright PhDs flooding out into the marketplace and academia as well.
The intellectual deadheads that seem to fill our present institutions of higher learning and government represent the hangers-on of that dilution of the cogent genepool. I witnessed this first hand when I changed colleges back then to pursue post-graduate studies (and a certain young lady). The new school I went to had added whole departments and faculty, and it was clear the faculty couldn’t keep up with my undergraduate training from my former world class school, let alone run on a higher plane entirely.
I saw a Coke commercial at the theatre with Penguins and Polar Bears partying together. What offspring would they produce?
Oh no!
Daily Telegraph 25 Feb 2010
Pen Hadow hit polar bear with a saucepan
“…the closest encounter was 20 years ago when a curious animal poked its head into his tent. Unable to reach a gun in time, Mr Hadow used the nearest weapon which was a dirty saucepan from the previous night’s supper.”
“The Catlin Arctic Survey, which last year measured the depth of sea ice around the North Pole, will this year investigate the dangers of ocean acidification.”
“All will be given special training and equipment to deal with temperatures down to -40F (-40 C) and the threat of polar bears.”
“Biologists from the American Museum of Natural History in New York found grizzly bears are increasingly being spotted in the Canadian province of Manitoba, even though they are officially extinct in that particular region.”